PING Full Form

What is the full form of PING?

PING stands for "Packet Internet or Inter-network Groper." It is a basic internet utility programme that allows a user to verify if a particular host destination is active and can accept requests in computer network administration. The acronym is contrived to match the submariner's term ‘sonar’ for the sound of a radar pulse for locating nearby objects.

This Story also Contains

1. What is the full form of PING?
2. Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper
3. How PING works
4. History of PING
5. Error indications
6. Security loopholes through ping

The ping programme is also used for verifying the existence of the desired IP address. The term "ping" also represents the speed of a data service-providing network.

Packet Internet or Inter-Network Groper

The PING programme is used to check the network connectivity between two systems. These systems can be classified as common computer servers, smartphone service-providing networks, server gateways, or routers. It is constructed to ensure or check whether or not the particular device on the network remains on the network, showing an active status. The ping command is one of the first commands that are used in order to troubleshoot communication problems on a TCP/IP network.

How PING works

• Ping operates through Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets. Pinging interests sending an ICMP echo request to the target host and waiting for an ICMP echo reply. If two systems are connected on a network a response from the other system would be generated as a series of packets, which is then guided from one device or another over the network.

• The programme reports errors and a statistical overview of the results, including the minimum, maximum, total round-trip time, and standard deviation of the mean.

• The command prompt of the ping utility and its output differs between the numerous executions. Options include the details about the data, such as limits for the number of network jumps (TTL) to study the transfer rate of packets, the count of repeated tests, the interval between the requests and the period for response generation.

History of PING

• In December 1983, Mike Muuss created Ping Utility. Since echolocation in sonar is a similar technique, he named it after the sound of a sonar system.

• The initial version that was made available was a public domain software, while the later versions were licenced under the BSD licence.

• Erick Engelke is the creator of the FreeDoS version which was licenced under the GPL

• The React OS version was later created by Tim Crawford which is available under the MIT licence.

Error indications

The following table shows the errors and the codes they are represented by:

Security loopholes through ping

1. An attacker may spam ping queries as quickly as they can, then theoretically overwhelm the target with ICMP echo requests to carry out a service denial attack. This method is known as a Ping Flood.

2. One may use the Ping Sweep protocol to get a list of every host on a network.