Another essential item in your network troubleshooting toolkit is the Packet Internet Groper (PING) utility. This utility sends small packets of information to a destination computer to verify network connectivity between the two systems. It is analogous to the way submarines use sonara small chunk of sound is sent out through the water, and an unseen ship's existence is confirmed when the sound bounces back to the originating sub. Similarly, if you ping a target computer, and that computer responds, you've just verified that the two computers can communicate; you've proven that the sender and receiver can exchange TCP/IP packets. Therefore, other types of communication should work as well. Well, sort of. If you can't ping, then very little else will work, but even if you can ping, there's still an awful lot that can go wrong. In any event, the syntax of the PING command is this:
IP address would be the target's address (which you might not know), and computername is a name like www.microsoft.com or beanlake. The full command would look something like this: ping 192.168.1.100.
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