Question

In 2017, Panasonic developed a prototype that not only washes and dries but also folds your clothes. There are some technologies that just belong together.

PathPing is the washer/dryer/folder combination of Windows. If you take a ping and squish it together with a tracert, you have PathPing. Each node is pinged as the result of a single command. Details of the path between two hosts and the echo‐location statistics for each node are displayed. The behavior of nodes is studied over an extended time period—25 seconds each, to be exact. This is in comparison to the default ping sample of four messages or default tracert single‐route trace.

PathPing will first do a tracert to the destination. Second, it uses ICMP to ping each hop 100 times. This is used to verify latency between the source host and the destination. You cannot completely rely on ICMP when public devices are involved. They are public devices. Occasionally on the Internet, you will run into situations where an ICMP ping destined for one host has 50 percent failure and the next hop has 100 percent success.

Figure 2.3 shows the tracing route to Google's public DNS server 8.8.8.8. From my desktop to the server, it takes 11 hops. Then PathPing will compute the statistics of round‐trip time (RTT) as well as the percentage of how many packets were dropped between the two IP addresses. When you see loss rates, it might indicate that these routers are overloaded.

Figure 2.3 : PathPing combining both traceroute and statistics of each hop

PathPing is a better diagnostic tool to use if latency in your network is a concern. The interpretation of the data from a PathPing will give you a more robust hypothesis. If you see anomalies or peaks and valleys in the data on hop 6, it doesn't necessarily mean that hop 6 is the problem. It could be that hop 6 just happens to be under immense pressure or the processor has priorities other than your PathPing at the moment. A tool that ISPs use to prevent overwhelming floods of ICMP is called control‐plane policing (CoPP). This type of flood prevention can also alter the results you see from PathPing. In Lab 2.3 , you'll use PathPing.

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LAB 2.3 : PATHPING

1. Open a command prompt, PowerShell, or a terminal window.
2. Type the following command to display options that you can use with the PathPing tool:

   pathping /?

3. At the next command prompt, type the following:

   pathping –q 50 8.8.8.8

   By using –q 50 as an option, you cut your time in half, although it will still be a very long 137 seconds.

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