Additionally, you may want to grant your vendor access to your system. As such, it is recommended that supervisory, or root accounts equivalent to yours be created with different password accessibility. Most routers, hubs and switches include ping as part of their command interface. Ping works by sending ICMP echo request messages to a specified host. Each device that implements IP is required to respond to ICMP echo requests with an echo reply message.
Ping measures the time between sending the request and receiving the reply.
Ping is probably the most frequently used network monitoring and troubleshooting tool because it is so widely available. However, the information it provides is limited, and may even be misleading. For one thing, the echo request and echo reply may use different paths in large redundant networks. With this in mind, a missing echo reply does not tell you which of the many possible paths might be broken, only that you cannot reach the destination and get back. Furthermore, ICMP echo request packets may be dropped due to congestion, and they may even add to the congestion, since they themselves are packets.