If ping is a wand , what spell you will cast only depends on you.

    

Ping is the favorite tool of network administrators for testing such things as connectivity, discovery, response time and so on over networks. Sadly, there's a sarcasm about being a hacker which is  "ping a server" then "I'm a Hacker !"

I was always hoping people not to think less about every tool which is useful in its own way. What I wanna point out is ping is a wand so you should cast your spell well or wand would be just rod. 

So let's assume ping travels with the speed of light of course in glass.

The speed of light is 299,792 km/s which is 299,792 km/1000 ms in vacuum. In glass it's slower; about 200,000 km/1000 ms (Fiber optics refractive index of 1.5).  So we can say;

            1 km/0.005 ms

          10 km/0.05 ms

        100 km/0.5 ms

      1000 km/5 ms

    10000 km/50 ms

  100000 km/500ms

The distance between Yangon and Bangkok is 569.64 km. For light to travel from Yangon to Bangkok and back from Bangkok to Yangon would take about 3 milliseconds. 

But , when we ping our web server hosted in Bangkok, we've the average time 29.864 milliseconds which is go and back round-trip-time. 

 

The distance between Yangon and Pennsylvania, USA is 13,594.87 km. For light to travel from Yangon to Pennsylvania and back from Pennsylvania to Yangon would take about 68 milliseconds. 

But, when we ping our isecom web server hosted in Pennsylvania, we've the average time 269.488 milliseconds which is go and back round-trip-time. 

So we notice that ping is slower than the speed of light. Yes, it should be slower , because: 

• The actual traveling route will not be straight line, there may have to be zig-zagging through such geometrical places as sea, ocean, mountains and so on.

• There are not only fiber optics connections between clients and servers. There are also switches, routers, servers, repeaters, copper cable, UTP/STP cables and so on and those cause the transfer speeds slower.

• And also choosing the route depends on the location of the co-operated organization's servers which are used to get to the destination server. 

We can identify to estimate if the distance between us and a destination is near of far, using "ping" that way.

What I wanted to point out is, the ping tool is not such a less tool. We can use it wisely as much as we understand how things works behind the scenes. The more we understand the nature of a tool , the more powerful we are with the tool. 

Remember tools are just wands, what spell will you cast only depends on you.

Read more about System Identification at :

https://www.hackerhighschool.org/lessons/HHS_en5_System_Identification.v2.pdf

Written By;

Starry