FPing is one of the most useful and reliable network debugging solution available.

The first ping program was written by Mike Muuss in December 1983 for use on Unix machines.

Muuss named his program after the sonar sounds used for echolocation by submarines, although some say ping stands for "Packet InterNet Grouper".

Ping sends a small packet of information containing an ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to a specified computer, which then sends an ECHO_REPLY packet in return. The ping program then evaluates this reply, and a report is shown.

You can check several things with the ping program: can you reach another computer, how long does it take to bounce a packet off of another site (what is the distance),

You can ping either a domain name, or an IP address. Functionality to show domain names when using IP addresses is supported. Even routing options are available, alas only 9 routes can be shown due to the structure of the IP header (RFC 792). Why did I write my own ping program?

There are two main reasons: a) It wanted to know how the ping program worked. I found it really intriguing and was very curious and b) There was a need for a better ping program here at the lab where I work.

Here are some key features of "Fping":

· Time between pings can be adjusted as needed from 1ms to 5s.
· Beep on every successful or unsuccessful reply allowing you to test your network status in the background.
· Ping multiple hosts with one simple command.
· Read a hostlist from a file
· Output redirection to a file for parsing.
· Ping with random data, or data you provide
· Ping using raw sockets, or use the ICMP dll. The choice is up to you.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Fix for Win2K for the getaddrinfo() function (since version 2.19)