Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bbn!rochester!udel!princeton!njin!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Dumb question: ping w/o icmp support? Message-ID: Date: 21 Oct 88 01:31:01 GMT References: <337@thor.wright.EDU> <440@gonzo.UUCP> <527@mks.UUCP> <13263@cisunx.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 13 >> A number of the machines I use support only the tcp and udp protocols. >> I'd really like to be able to ping from them. Is there any hope, short >> of harrassing the vendors? I think there is a confusion here. If they support TCP and UDP they have to support IP. (IP is the lower layer on top of which TCP and UDP are implemented.) Ping is implemented using ICMP echo. The IP specifications require all IP implementations to support ICMP echo. Now technically speaking all the spec requires is that your machine must respond to echos sent by other machines. But once the mechanism is present, I'd be a bit surprised if there isn't a way to issue a ping yourself. So I'll bet there's some way to make it work. What implementations are we talking about?