>Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 21:14:01 +1300
>From: gordon@morenet.net.nz
>Subject: Re: adsl ran quality
>
>*Sigh*
>
>Did it occur to you that you may not have a route to an RFC1918 address?
>Ping is not a a good diagnostic tool to use.
>All it tells you is that it sent an ICMP echo, and got a reply.
>Do a tcp trace to a real world address....

Oh come on.. give them a little slack.. that is precisely the sort of thing that starts flames on this list. Just because you see a post where the user is has less technical knowledge than yourself doesn't mean you have to reply to it and make them ever so much more aware of the fact.

Neither does it help to rattle off acronyms that the person you're replying to probably won't understand. Sure *you* know what RFC1918 is, and *I* know what RFC1918 is, but I have no doubt that a large number of people on this list don't know.

For those that don't know, it describes the ranges of private IP addreses that are reserved for non-internet-connected networks, including 192.168.x.x

What you say is reasonable, but did you have to *sigh* first ?

As you say, an ICMP echo (ping) is not a particularly accurate RTT (round trip time) tester, and microsoft's version of ping is less accurate than most, but it's not useless as a diagnostic tool. It is still good for ballpark figures when you don't have anything better handy, and it is a damn good diagnostic tool if all you want to do is check basic connectivity.

> /> SELECT * FROM user WHERE clue > 0; //> 0 rows returned/

And there was absolutely no call for that. Give other people a little credit. Maybe one day you'll need them for something YOU don't know much about.

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