I went to start->programs->accessories->, but there was nothing about a command window.

It's around there somewhere. :)

You can also go Start->Run, and then type "command" to bring it up, I think.

Many ways to think of ping...

In general, "ping" is akin to the sonar pulse of a submarine. If you don't get a return ping, no one is there. A sub's sonar, however is a general ping - is anyone there whereas the ping we're talking about is domain specific - i.e., are [you] there?

Another reason to "ping" is to verify that one has a valid connection before running a big process. Sort of like waiting till the other person answers the phone before going into a long, cellar-like diatribe :)

Hackers use ping a lot too. And so do Worms.

Be sure that your ping to google didn't work. Just because it says "destination unreachable" doesn't mean google wasn't "up." You have to look at the packets received in the statistics to see how many of the ones you sent came back. If any of them came back then google (or whoever) is up.

Ping is good for automated testing too... at work my network has maybe 15 or so gadgets that it needs to run properly (file servers, switches, etc.) I have a program that pings everything every few minutes. If any of the pings fail, I get an email sent to my cell phone telling me what's dead. Comes in handy. (Of course you need a backup in case the mail server itself or the internet connection is what's down!)

Important computing safety tip: If you can't find it, you probably can't use it ...

(favorite early net ping story ... guy named a machine on his lan elvis just so he could get back the ping response "elvis is alive" ... )

Verify range to target...
 

red-october.navy.su% ping -c 1 dallas.navy.mil

Thanks for the tip Wolf, but if I lived by that I wouldn't even turn the damn thing on.

??
 

Something is definitely messed up somewhere. I reinstalled IE6 and even tried using Mozilla. Google just won't display for me. It's driving me nuts because I use Google a lot and I can normally figure out stuff like this (just an ego thing).

Have you tried traceroute?

Can you ping 216.239.53.99 ? That's one of the addresses google.com responds to for me, and if you can ping it, it means that what's actually failing for you is DNS.

If you can't ping that address, look for a traceroute tool somewhere, or use the cmd version of it, tracert.

Yea, I tried that and it just times out. The weird thing is that it was working fine until my internet service went down a few days ago. When it went down the Google main page would load but of course the search function as well as other websites would not work. I managed to fix it (network DNS error) but Google seemed to get "black-holed" in the process. I now use the built in search function on Mozilla, which seems to work better than msn, but not as good as Google. I just don't know :confused: .

Traceroute (tracert on windowd cmd line) pings each routing point between you and the address, so that you can figure out where the weak link is. If traceroute is stopping right away, then it's blocked at your *machine* somehow. If it gets partway and stops, it's probably your ISP.

You probably have google cache'd. That's why the main page loads.

problem fixed
 

I finally discovered the problem. About a week ago someone suggested to me I delete the references to Google in my hosts.sam file (the file contains the addresses of popular search engines and is used by browsers). This seemed to work:biggrin: .

But at least something good came out of this. Back when I didn't know what was causing the problem I switched to Mozilla to see if it would work. Well, Google works fine now and iv'e now converted to Mozilla Firebird. It still has some bugs but it picks up where IE left off and all of the add on extensions work great.

Same issue
 

I have had the same issue where google and anything that uses google doesn't work. It stopped working after we got a new wireless router in our house. Only one computer on the wireless network is able to get to google (out of 4). The weird thing is that I have my Mozilla Thunderbird set to recieve my mail from mail.gmail.com server and it works just fine. But if I try to go to www.gmail.com I get timed out.

I tried pinging this address above and I did get a response back. I was also trying to find the host.sam file but was unable to. Any ideas? Thanks in advanced! :)

- Jori

try here:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.sam

Also, here's a link to way more than you ever wanted to know about hosts.