Fping

FPing

FPing is a free command-line program for Windows that sends ICMP echo requests to network hosts. It was written by Wouter Dhondt (Kwakkelflap) as a replacement for the standard ping command that comes with Windows. It is a useful tool for network administrators for performing network diagnostics and troubleshooting, and it adds many options that the built-in ping lacks.

Fping allows for efficient and accurate network latency testing.

Features

• Flexible target specification: FPing can ping several hosts in one command, an IPv4 address range, or a list of hosts read from a file.
• Statistics: FPing reports the packets sent and received and the minimum, average and maximum round-trip times, and can print the jitter with each reply.
• Continuous mode: FPing can ping continuously with statistics, which allows long-term monitoring of network hosts.
• Packet options: data size up to 65500 bytes, size sweep, random length, custom data, TTL, Type Of Service, record route and the Don't Fragment flag.
• Logging: FPing can log output to a text file and add a time and date stamp to every reply.
• Alerts and methods: it can beep on replies, resolve addresses to host names and ping through raw sockets or the ICMP DLL.

Performance

FPing is fast and efficient: the time between pings and the timeout for each reply are set in milliseconds, and a thread pool can ping many hosts in parallel. It is lightweight, runs without installation and does not require much system resources.

Compatibility

FPing is a Windows program with IPv4 and IPv6 support; range pinging, record route and Type Of Service work with IPv4 only. Its documentation lists Windows 95 through Windows 7 and Server 2008. The last version, 3.00, dates from 2012, and the program is no longer developed.

Conclusion

FPing is a powerful and versatile network diagnostic tool that can be used for a variety of tasks. It is lightweight, fast, and efficient, making it a good choice for network administrators. Its flexible target specification, detailed statistics, logging capabilities and packet options make it a valuable addition to any Windows network administrator's toolkit.