@Mark Ollig
The ping command tests a remote computer’s connectivity by sending a small data packet and measuring the response time.
Mike Muuss created the ping utility in December 1983 while at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, MD, as part of the Unix-based Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) developed by the University of California, Berkeley.
Ping was developed for Unix and later adapted for DOS (disk operating system) in the late 1980s as networking expanded. Named after sonar “pings,” the term stands for “Packet InterNet Groper.”
Ping uses ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) to check if a device is reachable and to measure latency, which measures network performance by assessing the time it takes for data to travel back and forth.
When I ran the ping mn.gov from the command line in my Windows operating system, the output was: “Pinging mn.gov [66.225.237.206] with 32 bytes of data.”
While small, 32 bytes effectively represent a basic network interaction.
Within brackets, [66.225.237.206] displayed the Internet Protocol (IP) address for mn.gov.
Four replies showed that the ping received packets of 32 bytes: “Reply from 66.225.237.206: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=48,” “bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=48, bytes=32 time=51ms TTL=48, and bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=48.”
The repeated “Reply from 66.225.237.206” lines were reassuring, confirming I was getting responses back from that specific IP address.
TTL (Time To Live) limits the number of hops (routers) a packet can pass through before being discarded.
The “bytes=32” and “time=…” parts provided technical measurements about each reply packet.
The “bytes=32” indicates 32 bytes of data were received, and “time=…” shows the round-trip time, meaning it took a certain number of milliseconds for the packet to go to the IP address and come back to my computer.
Other ping replies showed varying round-trip times: 63 milliseconds, 61 milliseconds, 51 milliseconds, and 59 milliseconds, with “Ping statistics for 66.225.237.206:”
This section provided a summary of the entire ping test, which focused on IP address 66.225.237.206: “Packets: Sent = four, Received = four, Lost = zero (0% loss),” which is good news, meaning all four ping packets I sent were successfully received back with no packet loss.
Finally, it gave “Approximate round trip times in milliseconds: Minimum = 51 ms, Maximum = 63 ms, Average = 58 ms.” Lower round-trip times are generally better, as they indicate a faster connection.
These times summarized the packet travel duration to and from 66.225.237.206, indicating connection speed and website responsiveness.
Key points about ping and IP addresses for sites like mn.gov: ping relies on and uses the Domain Name System (DNS) behind the scenes.
When I typed “ping mn.gov” and pressed enter, the command first performed a DNS lookup to resolve the IP address. The DNS (Domain Name System) translates website names into numerical IP addresses.
Websites like mn.gov may have multiple IP addresses.
The ping command generally resolves a domain name to a single IP for testing.
The nslookup utility, originally developed for UNIX, queries DNS servers and is often used by administrators of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) servers.
Developed at UC Berkeley in the 1980s by Douglas Terry, Mark Painter, and others, BIND evolved alongside the DNS, established in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris.
Nslookup was later ported to DOS in the late 1980s.
Using nslookup’s ability to resolve IP addresses to domain names makes it a valuable tool for network troubleshooting and DNS queries.
I used the “nslookup mn.gov” command to query DNS servers for information about the domain name.
The results showed:
Server: NCQ1338.mynetworksettings.com
Address: 192.168.0.1
This data indicated that the DNS server used for the lookup was NCQ1338.mynetworksettings.com, with an IP address of 192.168.0.1. and is likely the IP address of my local router, which is also acting as a DNS server.
The results also provided a “non-authoritative answer:”
Name: mn.gov, Address: 66.225.237.206.
This showed that the nslookup also found the IP address 66.225.237.206 for mn.gov.
The “non-authoritative answer” designation means this information came from a DNS server that is not the primary source of information for the mn.gov) domain, but rather a cached (collected) copy.
Unlike ping, tools like the “nslookup” command can retrieve multiple IP addresses for a domain if it has multiple DNS records, such as multiple A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) records for versions 4 and 6).
The nslookup command returned a single IPv4 address for mn.gov: 66.225.237.206.
The ping of mn.gov revealed the same IPv4 address and confirmed basic connectivity, but 66.225.237.206 could be only one of mn.gov’s assigned IP addresses.
IPv4 and IPv6 are the two primary versions of IP addresses.
IPv4, the original version, was developed in the 1970s by pioneers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, evolving from their work at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
IPv4, standardized in the early 1980s, uses a 32-bit “dotted decimal” format, allowing for about 4.3 billion unique addresses.
Initially, 4.3 billion was adequate, but rapid internet growth and the rise of various connected devices led to the depletion of IPv4 addresses.
The IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) officially ran out of IPv4 addresses in February 2011.
IPv4 remains in use because Network Address Translation (NAT) helps conserve addresses; its limitations led to the development of IPv6.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began developing IPv6 in the early 1990s to solve the problems of IPv4 address exhaustion and minimize the complexity of NAT.
Standardized in the late 1990s by Dr. Steve E. Deering and Robert M. Hinden, IPv6 uses a 128-bit hexadecimal format, allowing for around 340 undecillion (340 followed by 36 zeros) unique IP addresses.
I doubt that we will ever run out of IPv6 addresses.
Modern operating systems support the ping and nslookup commands for both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
During my time in the telephone industry, I used ping and nslookup to verify network connectivity to the IP addresses of voice and data-switching platforms.
