A Ping is a basic Internet program that allows for verification of the existence of a particular IP address. This is used to ensure that the host computer intended to be reached is actually operating. Recent developments have caused people to abandon their existing Ping community and standards which threaten to alter the positive outlook for Ping.
What is Ping All About?
In December 1983, Mike Muuss wrote a program used as a tool to troubleshoot peculiar behavior on an IP network. He named it “ping” after the pulses of sound made by a sonar. Its operation is considered analogous to active sonar in submarines wherein an operator issues a pulse of energy at the target which would then bounce back and be received by the operator. An acronym was provided by David Mills to mean “Packet Internet Grouper” and by other people as “Packed Internet Gopher”.
Its usefulness in terms of assisting the diagnosis of connectivity issue in the Internet was undermined when several Internet service providers filtered out echo request messages at their network boundaries. The use of Ping for target reconnaissance by Internet worms in locating new hosts to infect is partly to be blamed. Another factor that might have contributed to the situation is the resulting over all load on networks due to the wide availability of Ping responses.
The Ping utility has its unique use being essentially a system administrator’s tool to determine if a computer is working or if network connections are intact. Ping uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo function to send a small packet through the network to a particular IP address. The computer that sent the packet waits for a return packet. A good return packet will be received if the connections are good and the target computer is up. However, it is indicative of a problem with the matching of the name and the IP address when a packet bounces back. An extended period of time used up for the round trip is likewise indicative of a problem. Ping can also determine the number of hops that lie between two computers and the amount of time it takes for a packet to make a complete trip.
There are some things that Ping cannot tell. Ping may not be able to always provide the reasons why packets go unanswered. Neither can it tell why or where a packet was damaged, delayed or duplicated. A detailed description of every host that handled the packet and the details that happened along the way cannot be provided by Ping.
Dropped packets are usually detected through a skip in the sequence numbers and such number does not appear again. The probable causes for this are a queue that grew too large and link-level failures. Fluctuating round trip times are caused by the same things responsible for packet loss. Connectivity that comes and goes may be caused by problems in the router.
The negative creation of the Ping is the so-called Ping of Death that essentially crashes a system by sending a Ping packet larger than 65,536 bytes. An IP datagram of this size usually cannot be sent but perpetrators apparently chop the packet into small pieces when it is sent down the line and have it rebuilt at its destination. The sheer size of the packet causes the buffer to overflow and results to a reboot or a hang among others.
The Ping Outlook
Ping-O-Matic is the only remaining large-scale and independent Ping relay service left with the purchase of
http://Weblogs.com by Verisign. The purchase has been received by some quarters with skepticism due to Verisign’s supposedly checkered history in the blogosphere. All major content producers and companies relying on this specific Ping stream are considerably wary of this move.
Weblogs.com was widely perceived to be a service that has stagnated and a business that has declined. It is believed to have attempted to monetize what should otherwise be a public service. Users who got frustrated with the situation have chosen to abandon their existing Ping community and opted to produce their own feeds. There is a need to get competing services to work together so that no one gets to successfully exploit the situation.
There are those that believe that
http://Weblogs.com under Verisign may not be the solution to the existing problem in the Ping community but views it as a start of better things to come. However, there should be an entity having the resources and the ability to command respect among the tech companies being served that would run it. The cooperation of those that have extensive experience with it can only work to benefit the community as a whole.
The bleak outlook of Ping persisting at this time can be attributed to the fact that it is impossible to leave doors open on the web and not have it abused. The traffic gained by blog searches can all expect the same spam problems being experienced by other areas of the web. The problem will only worsen unless some barriers are put into place. It is also very difficult to come up with an algorithmic way to stop Ping spam. Clearly, the problem is not only about one entity purchasing a particular service.
Major search players such as Google and Yahoo! are expected to move to a combination of rapid crawling, trusted Pings and open Pings as a back up. Since they are able to get news content very fast, they can concentrate on spidering and hammering their trusted sites. They know the major blogs that really matter and be able to discover links from blogs as quickly as possible.
Another way is to have people enroll to come up with trusted Pings. Proper identification through signing up can be used to determine whose Pings are to be taken in and penalize those who abuse it. A redistribution of trusted Ping feeds by major players would be ideal but is almost next to impossible since they don’t share web crawling data. Major blog services will most probably continue to be trusted while others might take Pings for third party servers.
Some aver that the real surprise is seeing how open pinging has managed to survive this long. There are ways to be done to tackle spam such as through the machine learning algorithm and the like. It would probably be best to open the Pings up to the community and let them fix it.
Technorati, Bloglines and Feedster are all closed systems and Pings sent to them are only available to their service. Some are hoping to see an open system of notification and proposes Feedmaster to achieve it. It hopes to allow a wide variety of new services to be able to focus on getting into the stream of updates. At present, the various players are still actively participating but whether or not there is indeed a future for Ping would depend on how they act individually as competitors and as common participants in one community.
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