Ping sweep

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

A Ping sweep is a technique used to determine which of a range of IP addresses map to live hosts. It consists of ICMP ECHO requests sent to multiple hosts. If a given address is live, it will return an ICMP ECHO reply.

A ping is often used to check that a network device is functioning. To disable ping sweeps on a network, administrators can block ICMP ECHO requests from outside sources. However, ICMP TIMESTAMP and Address Mask Requests can be used in a similar manner.

Tools used for ping sweeps include fping, gping, and nmap for Unix systems, and the Pinger software from Rhino9. Pingers send multiple packets at the same time and allow the user to resolve host names and save output to a file.

[edit] Ping Sweep Tools

  • PacketTrap Ping Sweep (as part of pt360 Tool Suite)
  • AdventNet Ping Sweep Utility
  • Northwest Performance Software