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I don’t really know what I would do without PING.  Is it an acronym for  Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper or was it named after sonar activity?  I don’t really care.  PING is one of the first tools I try when I suspect a connectivity problem.  From resolving host names to checking the packet speed, I would be lost without such an invention.  Thank you Mike Muus.  May you rest in peace.  Here are a few things you may not have known about pinging.

• In case you need to ping an external IP, and your network blocks external pings, you can use a tools such as this one: http://network-tools.com/ to verify that an external site is available to ping.  (There are actually a number of useful tools you can find on this site.)
• TTL stands for Time To Live, and prevents a packet from looping eternally.  The TTL determines the lifetime value of the packet.  The maximum possible value of the TTL field is 255.
• If you know a computers IP address, but you want to learn the computer name you can use the “ping –a” command. 
  

Example: ping –a 198.133.219.25

Here are some other ping commands to try:

ping -a     Resolves IP addresses to hostnames
ping -i     Lets you set Time To Live (TTL)
ping -l     Lets you set the packet size
ping -n     Lets you set the number of echo requests
(the default is 4)
ping -t     Pings the computer you specified until you type Control-C (While ping is running, typing
Control-Break inserts statistics.)

ping -w     Lets you set the number of milliseconds to wait before each reply times out.