Solaris 10 Ping Command

The ping command is a useful tool that can help you debug connectivity issues. Ping can easily tell you whether a host is responding or not. The ping command is simple. Just provide a hostname or ip address and it will use the icmp protocol to contact the remote host. However, the solaris 10 ping command is not very descriptive. Below is an example of the output.

root@computer:~# ping google.com
google.com is alive

It is nice that google is alive, but the solaris ping command won’t give us more useful information by default, such as network latency or packet loss figures. The default command will only ping once then stop. It is useful to have the command ping continually so that one can debug the connection.

There is a parameter that can be passed to the command that will address the issue. It is the “-s” parameter. The ping “-s” parameter will send one datagram per second and collect statistics.

root@computer:~# ping -s google.com
PING google.com: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 74.125.224.116: icmp_seq=0. time=22.923 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.224.116: icmp_seq=1. time=21.722 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.224.116: icmp_seq=2. time=21.510 ms
64 bytes from 74.125.224.116: icmp_seq=3. time=31.216 ms
^C
----google.com PING Statistics----
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms)  min/avg/max/stddev = 21.510/24.343/31.216/4.624

This ping command output is much more useful than the default. Be sure to use the solaris 10 ping -s parameter when possible, it will make any network debugging considerably easier.