Testing Ping Times from an Outside Source

My blogless friend Zach shared this great tip with me: if you would like to test ping times to a machine from an outside source, telnet to route-server.ip.att.net. There, you will be presented with a command line which allows you to ping from the AT&T servers.

############## route-server.ip.att.net ############### ######### AT&T IP Services Route Monitor ########### The information available through route-server.ip.att.net is offered by AT&T's Internet engineering organization to the Internet community. This router has the global routing table view from each of the above routers, providing a glimpse to the Internet routing table from the AT&T network's perspective.

This router maintains eBGP peerings with customer-facing routers throughout the AT&T IP Services Backbone: 12.123.21.243 Atlanta, GA 12.123.133.124 Austin, TX 12.123.41.250 Cambridge, MA 12.123.5.240 Chicago,IL 12.123.17.244 Dallas, TX 12.123.139.124 Detroit, MI 12.123.37.250 Denver, CO 12.123.134.124 Houston, TX 12.123.29.249 Los Angeles, CA 12.123.1.236 New York, NY 12.123.33.249 Orlando,FL 12.123.137.124 Philadelphia, PA 12.123.142.124 Phoenix, AZ 12.123.145.124 San Diego, CA 12.123.13.241 San Francisco, CA 12.123.25.245 St. Louis, MO 12.123.45.252 Seattle, WA 12.123.9.241 Washington, DC

*** Please Note: Ping and traceroute delay figures measured with this box are unreliable, due to the high CPU load this box experiences when complicated "show" commands are being executed.

For questions about this route-server, send email to: [email protected]

#################### route-server.ip.att.net ####################

route-server>ping netnerds.net Translating "netnerds.net"...domain server (12.127.17.83) [OK]

Type escape sequence to abort. Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 69.90.210.117, timeout is 2 seconds: !!!!! Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 64/66/68 ms

In testing this, I also learned that telnet has been removed from Vista. Now really, Microsoft! Do your helpdesk people really never use telnet to troubleshoot network issues? I used it just yesterday to see if a Citrix server's port was open. What a load of poo. At least I learned another cool trick when researching the removal. Shamit Patel's blog suggested running start /w pkgmgr /iu:"TelnetClient" to install the client from the command line. Worked like a charm.. now to explore other options available with start /w pkgmgr.