Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ping

Why can I use PING but not HTTP on a yet-to-be-activated DSL account?

j0hnpaul — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:15:09 -0800

Why can I PING with my new DSL modem on an inactive account, but nothing else? Hi! My new modem arrived for Verizon DSL service, but my "service ready date" hasn't arrived yet, giving me some time to muse and experiment.

I noticed that when I set up the modem and connected my Mac via an Ethernet cable, my Network Diagnostics show that the computer is connected to the internet and the connection is working properly. I noticed I can also PING google.com, verizon.com, or any other website from the Terminal with zero packet loss.

On the other hand, everything useful about the internet is closed. I can't access anything in a web browser, and attempting to run the software Verizon sent me to "activate my account" or "troubleshoot my connection" fails. I surmise this is related to trying this before the "service ready date".

But the fact that PING works from the command line, and I'm able to send and receive data across the internet, makes me wonder how real the "service ready date" is. If it's possible to communicate with sites via PING, why not through HTTP? What's really going on?

How can I get to about.com on my computer?

rtha — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:41:50 -0800

I can't get to about.com or ehow.com on my macbook pro. Please help me figure out why. They're not sites that I go to often, but over the last few weeks I've noticed that neither site will load for me.

I have a 13" MBP running 10.5.8. When trying to load either site, I get "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at [about.com] [ehow.com]"

This happens in Firefox, even with Adblock Plus disabled. It also happens in Safari. It happens on my wireless network at home as well as my wireless network at work (different providers).

I can get to both sites in both places on my ipod touch. I can get to both sites on the macbook if I access IE by connecting via RDC to my (Windows) work computer.

Pinging both shows "no route to host"; running traceroot shows the same.

So what's going on? I'm not desperate to get to either site - I have askme, after all! - but I'm wondering if it's symptomatic of something else, and it's weirding me out.

Help me cast off Virgin cable broadband once and for all!

tumples — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:36:20 -0800

Virgin Media cable broadband sucks, what provider can I use after my contract is up? We have been using Virgin's (in)famous 20mb cable broadband since August and are tied into a 12 month contract. The internet is usually fine and when it works, it is very very fast. Unfortunately, Virgin are also prone to periods where the internet is mostly unusable; either it is doesn't work at all or it is just too slow. At the moment I am sat behind a connection with a ping of ~2500-3000ms, where it is usually ~20ms. Tech support doesn't fix the problem more often than not.

At the start of this coming August I will be free from this contract and am on the lookout for an isp that can just provide fast, reliable internet with (very important as living in student houseshare) little to no months caps on usage. We are not connected to a BT line and do not want to pay the ridiculous £140 to connect to them in order to sign up with a new isp.

Is there any company out there that is good for me?

Thanks

ping equivalent for web servers that reports http latency?

zippy — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:57:16 -0800

The equivalent of ping for http connections? I want to the equivalent of ping for webservers. I want to type in a simple command that generates 1 or more 1-line reports on the transaction: no. of bytes, response code, and round-trip latency.

For example, I would like to ask the tool to 'ping' my server once a minute for five minutes:

webping http://www.example.com/foo -i 60 -c 5

and see something like

1200 bytes (200) from www.example.com: seq=1 time = 240ms
1200 bytes (200) from www.example.com: seq=2 time = 240ms
1200 bytes (200) from www.example.com: seq=3 time = 240ms
1200 bytes (200) from www.example.com: seq=4 time = 240ms
300 bytes (404) from www.example.com: seq=5 time = 1500ms

Is there such a thing for linux/os-x? If not, is there a way to get what I want out of wget (shell / python munging of wget's STDOUT perfectly acceptable).

Network Knowledge

djgh — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 15:40:01 -0800

How can I analyse and understand what's going on with my PeerGuardian logs? How can I understand various network commands (e.g. ping, traceroute etc.)? I use PeerGuardian (OS X version), and even when I'm just surfing the internet it's adding to its logs telling me it's blocked various things.

e.g.

Sun Apr 12 2009 23:31:42.447 BST -Blck- 172.xx.xx.xx:xxx (netbios-ns) -> local:xxx (netbios-ns) udp4 'nmbd (xxx)' (Bogon:Ads, Spyware, Bogon, etc)

I'm assuming this means that it's blocked IP 172.xx... from accessing port xxx on my machine?

So taking things a step further, what can I do to work out 'who' this is? I've heard of ping and traceroute, and have a vague understanding of what they do - what else could I use just to gather info for purely academic purposes (i.e. - "ok, I understand what's going on, this black box makes sense to me now", rather than "I want to pwn joo with my l337 skillz!!11!)

Finally, I used to have (back when I was on Windows) what was essentially traceroute on a map (kinda like that scene in Goldeneye when they work out that Boris is in Cuba). Is there anything like that around for OS X? (it looked really cool, even if its utility was suspect)

Ping yes, ftp yes, http no.

sleevener — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:12:22 -0800

I can ping, I can ftp, I can do dns lookups, but I can't display web pages or anything else involving http, and I don't know what to do about it. I have a Lenovo T-61 laptop (I think), Linksys WRT54G router, and DSL modem provided by Verizon. A few days ago my browser stopped loading pages. Not dropping the connection, just apparently refusing (or not receiving) any incoming packets. My wife's laptop, connected to the router by wire, is fine. I tried connecting by wire as well: no luck. I also tried connecting at a local internet cafe, and the results were the same.

The weird thing is that I can successfully ping, do dns lookups, and ftp. But browsers won't display any web pages. I can telnet to outside sites, but not receive any responses when I ask for a page. I can't even get a response from the router when I put "192.168.x.x" in the address bar. It waits and waits for a response that never comes.

A computery friend says that it's as though I have a firewall-like bit of software that's blocking any activity on Port 80. I've turned off every firewall I know about. I've cycled the power on the modem and router plenty of times. I've disabled and reenabled both the wireless and wired connections in XP. I don't know what to do next.

There's a probably separate problem, which is that I can no longer connect wirelessly at home. Because I am a doofus, I disconnected from it, to try to "refresh" the connection, without remembering that I don't know the password for logging back in. I connected to the wireless at the cafe, and did some pings and ftp, so this seems like a separate problem, offered here only by way of confession of doofusness and repentance for same, in hopes that some divine malice may be placated.

Unfortunately for all of us, my education in computers comes the hard way, ie, usually through situations like this, where something isn't working right: thanks in advance for your help and instruction.

How to make pages load faster?

H. Roark — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:47:03 -0800

What can I do about some hosts making web-page loading very slow? Specifically, ad.doubleclick.net is killing me. Only in the last month or so, but sites like metafilter take ~1minute to load. This is Firefox on osx. Usually it says "connecting to ad.doubleclick.net...".

A simple "ping" command looks not to promising either:



computer:~/projects/datamining chris$ ping ad.doubleclick.net

PING ad.3ad.doubleclick.net (216.73.86.152): 56 data bytes

--- ad.3ad.doubleclick.net ping statistics ---

234 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

and a traceroute seems to go nowhere?



computer:~] chris% /usr/sbin/traceroute ad.doubleclick.net

traceroute to ad.3ad.doubleclick.net (216.73.86.152), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets

 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  1.352 ms  0.615 ms  0.534 ms

 2  * * *

 3  * * *

 4  * * *

 5  * * *

 6  * * *

 7  * * *

Is my new toilet okay?

Mayor Curley — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:20:47 -0800

I replaced a toilet about a week ago and since then I've been hearing little pings in the bathroom-- like what you might hear coming from a cooling ceramics kiln. I've noticed it three times. There are no visible cracks in the toilet. Is this normal? Or is my new Plebe (seriously!) toilet going to suddenly bust up?

The point of pinging.

seanyboy — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:37:01 -0800

What's the point of xmlrpc pinging? A blog I maintain pings a number of sites when posting new articles. These include ... b2evo.net, Weblogs.com and Blo.gs. What benefit does pinging these sites give me? I'm guessing that one of the sites tells google to index the new entry (I don't know which one does it), but other than that I can't see any benefit in doing this.

So, this is vague, but ... Why should I do this?
Am I missing something?
why does this kind of pinging exist?
Who tells google to reindex?

Mass Hostname-to-IP Address Converter

BigLankyBastard — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 09:26:50 -0800

Is there a program that can find the ip addresses of many network devices on a corporate internal network, and create a neat list automatically? I manage the main print servers on a major corporate network in the US. I have a long list of the TCP ports being used by these servers to send print jobs to the printers. Because we use DHCP for the printers, these TCP ports are all in the form of the print devices' hostnames. So in effect, I have a list of some 1300 hostnames and I want to make a list of the CURRENT IP addresses of all these hostnames. Is there a program that will automatically ping all these hostname from the list and produce a corresponding list exportable to .csv of all the IP addresses?

I tried googling but was only able to find web-based apps that worked for internet hosts. These are devices on the internal corporate network. I am hoping there's a simple app that can do this.

Randomize ping speed / size / destination?

allterrainbrain — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:15:44 -0800

In UNIX (specifically FreeBSD, if it matters), is there a way to *randomize* the interval and/or size and/or destination of pings? (For example, "at intervals ranging from 500 to 3000 ms, send somewhere between 50 and 200 bytes to any one of these twenty machines: x, x, x...")

If not, is there a utility for Mac OS (10.4, Intel) that's configurable like this?

Here's the man page for ping, which shows you can set a single value for interval and size, but not a range of values.

This is one idea I had for a network connection that is occasionally disconnecting and/or timing out (sometimes possibly due to inactivity, sometimes right in the middle of activity -- it's a little fragile/fiddly to begin with, so there could be multiple reasons).

I do know it's not consistently being kept alive with the old "just keep pinging to maintain activity" trick. So one theory I've come up with is that the ISP, knowing this trick, considers perfectly regular same-size activity to mean "this connection isn't actually active after all and so we should force a disconnect." Might be crazy, but if it's easy to test somehow, it's worth testing....

If you have any instructions, you're talking to someone with only functional/basic UNIX skills (who can get around in a shell when she needs to but usually lives in the Mac GUI).

Ping pong pros needed!

mphuie — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:17:40 -0800

Building a ping pong table to ITTF rules? Wood/paint selection help needed. I want to build a ping pong table. The construction isnt an issue but more of materials questions, mainly what type of wood and what type of paint to use.

I'd like to follow the ITTF exact rules:

'The playing surface shall yield a uniform bounce of about 23cm when a standard ball is dropped on to it from a height of 30cm.'

'The playing surface shall be uniformly dark colored and matt, but with a white side line, 2cm wide, along each 2.74m edge and a white end line, 2cm wide, along each 1.525m edge.'

So for the wood, (most guides say use MDF, how thick should I go?) I am also playing on carpet, would i need spikes that go through the carpet (like for speaker stands) for a better bounce?

The surface details arent very clear as for the type of paint used isnt very clear. Googling it seems to result in using chalkboard paint.

Does anyone have experience building ping pong tables?

blogging / pinging / rss / publishing

reflexed — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:36:03 -0800

Can I use a desktop blogging client to upload posts but keep them 'Unpublished' in Movable Type? What exactly happens when Movable Type publishes? I'm looking for a desktop / browser blogging client to use with Movable Type 3.34 that will give me WYSIWYG editing, and I've got a couple questions about how Movable Type works.

I'd like something that will let me upload posts to the server but keep them with an 'Unpublished' status so that I can choose when to publish them later.

So far I've tried BlogJet, BlogDesk, ScribeFire, Ecto, and Windows Live Writer.

All (but Windows Live Writer) give you the option to upload post as a draft, but then within the Movable Type interface the post appears as published (however, it doesn't actually show until the site is rebuilt). If I actually publish the post in one of the clients, it appears on the front page.

So--a couple questions about how Movable Type works:

1. Is this behavior to be expected? (Someone was recently explaining to me that when you schedule a post to go up later, there's a bug in Movable Type and it won't actually appear until the site is rebuilt--this 'post as draft' behavior would seem to go along with that.)

2. As long as I post as draft and then switch to 'Unpublished', I should be fine as far as my posts not going out, right?

3. If I forget to publish as draft, and the post goes live, but then I immediately change it back to unpublished, will it still go out in my RSS feed? What's the time delay? (Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding the way RSS works--is the post only accessible if the person loads the feed that second it's live, but if they check later it won't be there?)

4. Same with the servers I'm pinging--if something goes live and I unpublish/delete it, does the ping still go out and just point back to nothing? Or does the ping die/negate itself?

5. And finally...which desktop / browser blogging client do you prefer?

Basically I don't want to pre-publish / annoy my readers when I use something other than the standard Movable Type interface to put posts on the server. I'm relatively new to Movable Type and blogging in general, so any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks hive mind!

Looking for a simple web site monitoring tool

RedMosquito — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:48:39 -0800

I'm Looking for a simple windows-based web server monitoring tool (preferably free) that can sit and run (as a service would be nice) and ping a remote website at a pre-determined interval and just fire off an e-mail notification if it does not get a response. I checked out IPCheck but it does way more than I need. Any suggestions?

Website cannot be reached - Why?

TauLepton — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:14:52 -0800

TechFilter: Why can't I browse/ping/tracert to tikiwiki.org? Several people have told me (via IM) that they have no troubles reaching tikiwiki.org (84.207.3.18). However, when trying to get there from my home OR work computer...timeouts.

Tracert stops at the same server:
--cont from the route--
pos9-1.mpr2.cdg2.fr.above.net [64.125.23.10]
te1-4.er2b.cdg2.fr.above.net [64.125.23.33]
62.4.73.12
timeouts galore

I do understand basic info about how the net works - so why won't this take another route when it encounters a problem?

I'd really like to install the software as our main wiki, but without access to the support community that seems like an exercise in futility.

Question 1: Why is this happening/why won't another route be explored?
Question 2: How can I reach the website?

Thanks!

need ISP/IP map

b1tr0t — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 13:38:18 -0800

Is there a database or service that can take an IP address and return the name of the ISP that owns it? In order to better understand Net Neutrality, I may build a tool to gather neutrality statistics from around the internet. The tool would either be a browser plugin or a windows systray icon that pings a few dozen popular websites a few times daily and then sends a digest of the results to a central server.

So far, all of this is simple enough, but I need some way to take the IP Addresses used by people running my tool and resolve them to particular IP addresses.

Browser times out but ping, nslookup, and tracert work (WinXP). Why?

Songdog — Mon, 29 May 2006 07:37:48 -0800

On my WinXP Pro laptop I can ping, nslookup, and tracert to whatever address I like, but no browser can load any pages, even by IP address. I get connection timeouts 100% of the time. Why, and how can I fix it? I have broadband access, shared in my home network via a router. Other machines are working as normal via this router. I'm running Kerio Personal Firewall but it makes no difference if I disable it. I've tried disabling and re-enabling the network adapter, I've tried flushing the DNS cache, I've tried releasing and renewing, I've tried "repairing" the connection. No dice. I have a perfectly good IP address assigned from my router (which I've tried rebooting). As stated above I can run "nslookup metafilter.com" and get an IP address, and I can tracert and ping by domain name or IP address, but when I try to browse to either a name or IP address I get a connection timeout. I've tried Firefox (my usual browser) and IE, both of which worked before.

Grudging admission #1, which will make some of you dismiss this as a wireless networking, issue: everything works fine when I try a wired connection. However, I'm sure it's not an issue with WiFi per se, because I can see the net, just not in a browser.

Grudging admission #2: Everything worked fine until I used the same machine to connect to a shared connection via Bluetooth the other day. The notebook has a built-in Bluetooth adapter, which I normally disable unless I'm using my Bluetooth mouse. I recently used a USB dongle to share an internet connection from another machine when I had no other way to get my notebook online. That worked just fine, and I didn't have to change any settings outside of those specific to the Bluetooth adapter and connection. I suspect, however, that as a side effect and to spite me for messing with an otherwise stable configuration, something has gone awry with the WiFi network connection/adapter in somewhere in Windows, even though I didn't directly change this adapter. How can I change it back?

Since it seems like the solution might be the same, I'm going to ask about a second problem: a friend of mine just asked for my help fixing her network, which is similarly afflicted: she also has broadband and WinXP, though she has one machine and no router. She can ping, nslookup, and tracert as well. But Firefox can't load any pages. IE can load some pages but bombs out on others (notably all secure HTTP connections). She can run her AOL client and access email. I'm hoping that fixing one of our problems will illuminate the solution to the other.

I have been all over in Google looking for answers to this sort of problem but I'm apparently not clever enough to find such answers, though they must exist somewhere. When I learn the solution to this myself I'll shout it from the rooftops!

Does a site have to be using blog software to utilize the trackback feature on their site?

nramsey — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:06:47 -0800

Does a site have to be using blog software to utilize the trackback feature? I thought the answer was yes, but then I saw that PR Web has just added Trackbacks to their releases. So what is the secret of the Trackback?

Table tennis?

GooseOnTheLoose — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 17:39:35 -0800

Table tennis? I'm going to sign up for intramural table tennis at my university. I love playing, but growing up I've developed all kinds of bad habits and I also have very little knowledge outside of generic paddles and spin techniques. I want to take my game to the next level, starting with a solid paddle for my play style. I use a modified pen-hold grip (two fingers in front of the handle, two behind the handle, with the thumb over two fingers on the front). I play a slower game with dramatic spin and very little top spin/hard strikes.

First of all, I want a good paddle. Looking online I determined that there are two variables, and two sides of the spectrum for each variable. The blade, which can either be fast or slow, and the rubber, which can either be spinny/fast (I'm assuming it's sticky and hard) or more control oriented (I'm assuming here it takes spin off the ball and absorbs impact). I am thinking I want a slower blade with spinny/fast rubber and a flared handle(do I?). Also, I don't mind paying 70 dollars for this paddle, but I wanted to know if these are overpriced toys with little return for your money or necessary to a solid game. Are there maybe cheaper places on the 'net to buy them than the first hits on google? Am I confused, and I should be buying a fast blade with control rubber?

Secondly, I need a way to strengthen my backhand. My forehand is strong, and I can put several directions of spin on it, but when the ball gets to the left of me I am only able to put enough top spin on it to return it without it missing the table, and it slows down dramatically. Any ideas, stances/footwork, use the force Luke, etc. would be appreciated.

The only reason I ask such an aggressive question to a seemingly innocent game/intramural activity is that there are a lot of asians at my university. I've seen them play at the rec centers here, and let me tell you, it isn't beer and ping pong in the garage anymore.

The mystery of the double homepage

stormygrey — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:35:43 -0800

Why would users be seeing two different home pages? We switched servers (to Dreamhost) on Thursday evening and now some people are seeing the "live" site, while some are seeing a site that is not showing up on Dreamhost but has been updated in house since the transfer, what gives?

If it helps, other sites within the site are showing up correctly and pinging correctly, whereas when you ping our site proper it says it can't find the site. How can I find the IP of the wrong front page without using ping? Please help solve this mystery!

my pings dont come back

ugrndhg — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 10:09:27 -0800

I only ping intermittently if at all, to a wireless router whenever bittorrent is started. Its not upload/download limits/bandwidth or the usual, as there does not need be any data tranfer to time out, just having the BT program running. Bittorrent itself is fast as a button throughout. Upload downloads are limited, ports forwarded, the torrent speed is not the issue, its solely that while using BT, even if all torrents are stopped, there is really bad browsing, and pings to the router are randomly returned. As soon as BT client is closed totally, pings all return. it only recently started so i restored factory setting and reset all, but has anyone else fond the cause?

How to show updates of sub blogs on a community blog?

asterisk — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 11:26:11 -0800

blogFilter: So a professor wants to use a blog type setup for a class. I've been charged with trying to find a way to show updates across blogs in this class. So there is a class blog powered by Movable Type (a community blog) and each student has a WordPress blog of their own. Is there a way to show when students update their individual blogs on the community blog? I've been reading about pinging via XML-RPC but I'm not seeing any nice plugins for the server end of things. (I'm not a fantastic programmer)

I have access to the MT server and I can add things to the WP install package that will be given to students if that helps.

How do you ping weblogs now that weblogs.com has switched to buzzword.com?

thebwit — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 07:01:32 -0800

Ok, since weblogs.com has sort of switched over to buzzword.com all my rpc pings to weblogs.com time out like no other. Did the way to ping weblogs change? I tried looking on the site, but then weblogs times out. Anyone know?