A Portable, yet Graphical way to PING

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Network Utility

Network Utility (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

If you are a Blackberry user, and you see the topic of this post, what first comes to mind? Blackberry Messenger? Well, you’re wrong today, because this is the traditional PING. In fact, graphical ping – getting more out of ping.

obama-PING

PING!!!

According to Wikipedia.org, a PING (short for Packet INternet Groper) is a computer network administration utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer. Okay, that’s a mouthful. A ping is simply used to check whether another computer on a network is alive and reachable, just like saying hello and expecting a reply. So in Blackberry terms, a ping is just like telling someone hello. [You can compare this to a Facebook Poke].

The Challenge

For network administrators and hobbyists like me, the command line ping may not be enough. The traditional ping.exe cannot ping multiple hosts at the same time; it is not graphical either.  And traditional Windows OS does not have a GUI ping facility. And I desperately needed portability.  There are products like nmap, angry IP scanner, ipscan, total network monitor, look@lan, hover ip, fing, etc, but they do not seem to satisfy my needs. What then do I do?

The Solution

After searching for tools online, I came across a pretty simple tool that fit just perfect – PSWEEP.

PSweep (by Digitalblast) is a a handy and LLIGHTWEIGHT application that can detect active IP addresses. It is PORTABLE (it comes bundled with files like comdlg32.ocx and mscomctl.ocx necessary for execution); It can resolve IP addresses to host names, you can set it to ping a list of IPs in a text file, and you can save the results for viewing later.

You can download psweep at softpedia, or alternatively from this direct link.

Please do not forget to leave a comment, or tweet at me @kcemenike.

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11 thoughts on “A Portable, yet Graphical way to PING”

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