Everyone knows ping. But over the decades, the networking community has quietly built an entire family of specialized variants — each solving a problem that standard ICMP couldn't.
A few examples of why you'd reach for something else:
tcping — when firewalls eat your ICMP and you need to test port availability
arping — L2 diagnostics and duplicate IP detection, no IP stack needed
fping — scan a /24 in seconds, all hosts in parallel
OWAMP — when you actually need one-way latency, not just RTT
dnsping — when the slowness lives in your resolver, not the network
I put together a comparison table of the most useful ones, across protocol, OSI layer, platform, multi-host support, and root requirements.
The OSI layer column alone tells you a lot — if you're reaching for ping to debug something that lives at L4 or L7, you're probably using the wrong tool.
What about Google? Anyone has any insights on their unit economics since they own the models and the infrastructure (which is also custom TPUs)? Are they doing better or are they in the same money losing business?
It must be hard for them to figure how much of their revenue is down to AI and how much to other stuff like search. They certainly make a lot of revenue and it would be foolish for them to ignore AI and have OpenAI and Perplexity eat their lunch.
It feels like Google should be able to come up with a revenue figure for search ai results right? How many people do a search but don't click on any links because they just read the ai blurb, but advertisers are still charged for being visible on the page.
I've used a Sunweyer dongle from Amazon. If you can't get the "new shopper" discount on Aliexpress, it's cheaper. Seems to work fine. Doesn't like pairing to multiple phones, and the phone doesn't like being plugged into one of the car's USB outlets (it drops the audio because AFAICT the phone thinks it's plugged into the car for audio, but the car is still expecting audio over the Bluetooth "CarPlay" connection), even if it's one of the outlets that's not supposed to do anything but power.
I'd use it a little differently, but it's my wife's car, not mine. Who would have thought a 2022 Mercedes would have wired-only CarPlay?
Anyway, I find it excellent for podcast control. If maps are off (in my case, because location services are turned off) it doesn't really use more power than plain Bluetooth audio, and when I approach my destination on a trip I'll turn on location and plug it in to juice up the last bit.
Smokeping is an amazing and underrated resource as a network health metric and diagnostics tool.
If you have a network monitoring or asset system you can export IP addresses from, you should use a small glue script to automatically build a smokeping configuration. I've got one for our LAN and one for the WAN at each of our sites so I can track down issues at either level.
The LAN connection charts are a great daily sanity check, and the WAN connections (I have every-to-every for each site so any and all inter-site issues can be seen) can help keep your ISP honest with the service they're delivering.
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