Nearly everyone who has had experience with networking and the Internet knows PING. The command is available on just about every platform in some form or another, and is fairly easy to use. It also is considered one of the most simplistic commands out there, or so I thought. As far as I was used to, PING is usually just used to check connectivity between two hosts. No more, no less. Well as it turns out, there is just a bit more to it than that, which I found out today in my continued experience with Train Signal’s CompTIA Network+ course.

Now I consider myself a pretty technically savvy guy. I mean, most of my friends and family look to me when they need help fixing stuff on their home PC’s and other electronics (I really should start charging them too, geez). But after watching videos 8 & 9 of the Network+ course, I realized I didn’t even know that PING was an acronym (Packet InterNetwork Groper — if you’re like me). Of course, that’s not all I learned about it. Our instructor Chris Bryant lets us know a bunch of different situations where PING is useful. I’ll list a few of them here as common complaints from users:

• “The network is slow!” — use PING to show the real round trip times for packets
• “I can’t connect to the internet!” — use PING to see if it’s simply a DNS problem
• “I can’t print to our network printer!” — use PING to check the print server by name then by IP address instead

See what I mean? There are definitely a huge number of every day (well let’s hope not every day, right?) network troubleshooting issues that PING can help you diagnose without any special effort. That’s the kind of extra, “real world” network experience that Chris Bryant brings to every video in the Network+ Course. I think that’s what makes Train Signal different (and better!) than any other certification computer training.

Enough from me. If you like, you can see for yourself what makes us different:
Train Signal & Train Signal Training’s FREE training vids

4 Responses to “Network+ Videos 8 & 9: Who Knew?”

• Rudy Says:

  August 27th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

  I find PING very useful, sitting on my desktop wrapped in a Windows bat file containing my Gateway, DNS Preferred and Alternate IP addresses. With the click of a mouse the most important, well relevant to my computer, IP addresses can be checked. I always get a shout from another room in the house ” the network is slow or not working!” Running my bat file I find the DNS server is hit and miss, sometimes and once my ISP or the route to my DNS servers is cleared up all goes back to normal.

• Bill Bullock Says:

  August 29th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

  That’s exactly the kind of thing that a simple solution like PING in a Bat file is great for. There are plenty of programs out there that go through all kinds of tests and logging on a network. Honestly though, they can be such a pain to configure that they aren’t worth it. It’s especially true when we are just talking about your home network and your younger brother (or spouse or teenager) is having “trouble” with some non-critical process. Way to keep it simple and effective, Rudy!

• Rudy Says:

  August 30th, 2007 at 8:58 pm

  “Introduction To Networking Technologies” by Chris Bryant is proving to be a bit difficult to retain. My opinion the problem is the lack of Hardware and software to test theory. Scott’s courses are especially affective with both hardware and software available for learning “hands on”.
  Can you recommend a router for my ADSL connection which would allow me to apply some of what I have learned.
  Looking to replace my Linksys router with Cisco Router so I can run through some configuration scenarios.

  Current setup:

  ISP modem–>LinksysRouter–>PC’s and Mac’s

• Bill Bullock Says:

  August 31st, 2007 at 9:02 am

  Hey Rudy,

  I’m glad that you are willing to give Chris’ lesson a more hands-on approach to see if you retain it better. In my experience, this helps a lot. To answer your question, there are many routers that are made by Cisco, and some are definitely better than others. But there is one thing that is great for you: all Cisco routers come with basically the same software (firmware) called the Cisco IOS. Pretty much any router you get (read: any *cheap* router you can get) from Cisco will work with this intro level course. This is great news for you, and anyone else looking to test their network setup at home.
  I would recommend looking on ebay and searching for “cisco router.” organize them by price and you’ll find some pretty decent packages for cheap. Also, if you like, you can go to Chris Bryant’s site to learn more about what routers to use for home testing:
  The Bryant Advantage.
  I hope that helps you, and thanks for choosing Train Signal!

  -Bill

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