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A Great GUI Ping Tool

May 05, 2005 12:15 PM
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I was tired of having to do the command-line ping in Windows (especially because I don't keep a console open), and couldn't find a tool that would do the one thing I needed: show what IP address a domain resolves to at any given moment.

The regular ping does this, but lots of the GUI versions omit this important information (I guess it never occurred to them that someone might have more than one server on the same domain):

Examples with screenshots:

And then I found PingPlotter, which was just what I was looking for. Even though I don't use 90% of the features, it has the one I was needed — the domain and IP are displayed front-and-center. Thanks for your attention to detail, guys.


Comments: A Great GUI Ping Tool

Ping for lookups? Ick.

nslookup is the tool for that.

For a GUI I like Sam Spade: http://www.samspade.org/ssw/

Posted by: kearns on May 5, 2005 7:14 PM | permalink

I don't know that nslookup does what I want. We have three servers round-robined and when I do a nslookup, I get all three IPs.

What I want to do is know which server my browser is hitting without revealing information (even commented-out info) in the web page.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on May 5, 2005 10:31 PM | permalink

Great little tool - thanks for the tip! I'll be sure to use it at work. Much nicer than nslookup or the usual tracers.

Posted by: Josh on May 5, 2005 10:35 PM | permalink

It's more a traceroute gui than a ping one, but it works quite well.

Posted by: Priapo on May 11, 2005 10:57 AM | permalink

Thanks for mentioning this neat tool. Sure beats ping from a console. I'll mention it on my blog http://blog.surfulater.com when I get a chance. :)

Posted by: Neville Franks on May 12, 2005 6:52 PM | permalink

would ping be a good item to use if I want to test a wireless air card connection back to my network using a citrix connection, or is there something that would be better on a XP machine? for latency, packet loss, throughput....and other stuff.

thanks.

Posted by: sean on February 9, 2007 12:26 PM | permalink

If you go to the DOS prompt (Windows - Run, type "cmd") and type "ping www.google.com", you will see that you do have ping.

As far as the specifics of your situation, I dont' know much more. But I do know that WinXP boxes have ping available.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on February 9, 2007 12:33 PM | permalink

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.