ping strangenessPing strangeness is a term used in a popular book on network design and troubleshooting to describe the incidence of an unusual pattern or frequency of Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper messages in a network. Pings are used to determine the presence of particular Internet Protocol ( IP ) addresses on host computers in a network and the time it takes for the ping packet to return. Besides being a useful diagnostic tool, pings are sometimes used by router program ICMP requests so that network router tables can be kept up-to-date. The issuance of a ping request by a user or a program results in an Internet Control Message Protocol ( ICMP ) echo request. If the remote IP address is active, it responds with an ICMP echo reply. Ping can be used as an alternative to the traceroute utility to trace the hop or path that the ping echo takes through the network. Ping is faster, however, and generates less network traffic than traceroute. Using a network monitor like LANalyzer for Windows, a network administrator can follow a packet exchange. If, for example, the monitor shows a consistent pattern of unexplained pings occurring in the same time period as the packet exchange, this "strange" pattern may be worth investigating. A consistent and continual pattern would suggest that the pings were not the result of someone trying to attack the network (since the attack would be made too obvious) but rather that the hosts originating the pings had been programmed to issue them for some reason. For example, Synoptic hub sometimes seek a network management station, an optional facility that Synoptic offers. The hubs will look for the management station using ICMP pings at frequent time intervals. If the management station doesn't exist, the pings will continue, causing unnecessary traffic. In this example, one solution would be to disable the Internet Protocol on each hub.
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| Last updated on:
Apr 05, 2005 |
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