The internet has fundamentally changed the majority of the applications we develop. Rarely is an application designed to exist in isolation. Instead, most apps rely on other networked apps to retrieve and store information. In this post, we’ll explore the network utility ping and how we can utilize a C# library to test the reachability of any network host.
The ping command helps determine TCP/IP networks IP address, and issues with the network and assists in resolving them. See the ping definition for a full description.
What Is Ping?
Sign in or signup for Bing Webmaster Tools and improve your site’s performance in search. Get access to free reports, tools and resources. A successful Ping operation means your packets are reaching the 10.5.5.1 interface. An unsuccessful Ping operation indicates there is a problem with the connectivity between your system and interface 10.5.5.1.
Written in 1983 by Mike Muuss, the design of the ping utility is one that allows network administrators to measure, diagnose, and troubleshoot network issues. Being developed in the military, ping naturally gets its name after the sound sonar makes and mimics the behavior of sonar itself.
Ping is a computer network administration software utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network. It is available for virtually all operating systems that have networking capability, including most embedded network administration software. –Wikipedia
Ping Ps3 Games
When invoked, ping transmits a set of bytes, and the output shows information including the host’s IP address, the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) sequence, the Time To Live (TTL), and the total response time in milliseconds.
As we can see, the output can help us diagnose whether our target host is up and responding expectedly.
Ping with .NET
While being a command-line utility on most operating systems, ping is also implementable. Gemoro company. The .NET Framework has an implementation of Ping under the System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace. We can use this class to perform the same ping actions from our C# applications.
We get the following results from running our console application.
One strange behavior we notice is the reply buffer length is always 0. The odd behavior is because the Ping class behaves differently based on our operating system. On Unix systems (Linux and macOS), the .NET Framework delegates to the UnixCommandLinePing class, which does not map PingOptions and does not read the response byte array. The difference in behavior across operating systems should be accounted for, as it could cause null reference exceptions`.
Ping Console Browser
The cool thing about the Ping implementation in .NET is the presence of the IPStatus enum, which makes it clear what kind of response we are dealing with.
There we have it! We can ping a network host and wait for a response right from our .NET code. Give it a try and leave a comment below.