Ping sweeps have the same three major use cases as single pings - discovery, monitoring, troubleshooting - plus applications in network security. Only the live hosts will reply or “pong” back, giving you equivalent results of multiple single pings in one fell swoop. In contrast to a single ping, a ping sweep uses ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) ECHO requests to communicate with multiple hosts at the same time. Ping sweep, also known as ICMP sweep or a ping scan, is a network scanning technique you can use to find out which IP addresses map to live hosts. If a ping fails altogether, you can ping surrounding parts of the network to see if the issue is isolated or widespread. For example, if a ping is successful by name and IP address but the device takes a long time to respond, you now know there might be a network speed or congestion issue. Troubleshooting: A simple ping can tell you valuable information.

Monitoring: If you’re running a ping with a “run until stopped” option, failed pings will let you know there’s something wrong with your system.

Since virtually all devices will respond to a ping if they’re connected to the network, you can ping a range of devices or IP addresses to quickly and easily find all available devices within the range.

Discovery: Ping can be used as a network discovery tool.

Ping is predominantly used to keep track of device availability and network latency, but this simple and effective technique has many different use cases: The actual ping is a packet of 32 to 56 bytes containing an “echo” request for the host to respond to if it is online, available, and performing network operations at speed.

Close the command prompt to complete this activity.Ping is a signal used to see if a device connected to a network is reachable or measure how long it takes a networked device to respond to a request.

Observe the list of hosts on the network.

To list hosts that responded to the ARP request: However, they will still acknowledge the underlying Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) request that first converts their IP address into a Media Access Control (MAC) address. Most systems now have a firewall in place that prevents them from responding to the ping sweep.

Windows example to find live hosts(for /l %i in (1,1,254) do -n 1 -w 100 192.168.0.%i | findstr 'Reply')Īctivity 3 - List Responding Hosts Observe the results as the command sweeps the network searching for hosts.If using a bash command shell, on most Linux OS, a similar example would resemble for i in do ping -c 1 -W 1 10.1.1.$i done, where the count for ($i) would be from 1 to 25. This command instructs the computer to loop (for /l) counting from 1 by 1 to 254 (1,1,254) and execute (do) a ping command with a count (-n) of 1 and a wait (-w) time of 100 milliseconds and the given network address and changing host (%i) address. From a Microsoft OS command line, Type for /l %i in (1,1,254) do -n 1 -w 100.For example, if the IPv4 Address is 192.168.1.101, this activity will assume that the host network is 192.168.1.0, and has potential host addresses from 192.168.1.1 through 192.168.1.254.Īctivity 2 - Perform a Ping Sweep For this activity, the host network will be assumed to be a 24-bit network based on the first three octets of the host IP address. Use ipconfig to display the host IP address.These activities will show you how to use the ping command to perform a ping sweep.Īctivity 1 - Identify the Host Network 2 Activity 1 - Identify the Host NetworkĪ ping sweep is a network reconnaissance using some type of ping (ICMP echo/reply) to locate hosts on a network.

Icmp ping sweep