PING is one of the most useful commands in determining network connectivity with another IP host. Simply typing PING followed by the specific IP address at the command prompt will immediately tell you whether there is connectivity between your computer and the other host.

There are also a number of options that you can use with the PING command. The available options are listed below.

-t Pings the specified host until stopped
-a Resolves addresses to hostnames
-n count Number of echo requests to send
-l size Send buffer size
-f Set Don’t Fragment flag in packet
-i TTL Time To Live
-v TOS Type of Service
-r count Record route for count hops
-s count Timestamp for count hops
-j host-list Loose source route along host-list
-k host-list Strict source route along host-list
-w timeout Timeout in milliseconds to wait for each reply

You can always find out more about a specific command by typing the command at the command prompt followed by “/?”.