

The best ping story I've ever heard - ozh
http://www.askapache.com/hacking/ping-unix-darpa-muuss.html#ping_story_Ive_heard

======
andor436
I once recovered a stolen car with ping.

It was 2002 (2003?), and we had just launched Zipcar in New York. Being a
naive start-up we had perhaps not the most stringent security measures in
place to prevent fraud and theft. Sure enough, a couple of weeks in and one of
our cars went missing. Calls to the member went unreturned, and it became
clear that the member was not who they claimed to be and had no intention of
returning the car.

At the time Zipcar was using the mobile analog CDPD network for vehicle
communications, which had a top speed of something like 19.2k/s and cost us
around $1/month per KB of data. However, it also had a limited number of data
channels, and since it used the old AMPS network broadcast in the 800 - 900
MHz range. I happened to have an amateur radio license and a radio that was
able to receive in that band.

Since we were still in contact with the missing car we knew it hadn't been
chopped (yet) and I figured we might be able to use some sort of radio
direction finding technique to locate the car. My friend and fellow engineer
Carl was able to reprogram the firmware of our embedded electronics to tell us
which cell tower the car was in contact with, and with that we could look up
the FCC id in their database to find the tower's street address.

So my boss Roy and I hopped into his car and drove to Long Island. We drove up
to the tower, and I leaned out the window of his minivan with a yagi antenna
and my radio (set to scan the 40 or so CDPD channels.) We asked Carl (back in
Boston) to start pinging the car. To the radio this sounded like a half-second
burst of static, but since it was very regular it was also very easy to
identify. Sure enough, after driving around for a few minutes we picked up the
signal. _pffft_ _pffft_ _pffft_

We drove around the tower in a wide circle until the signal was the strongest,
got out to scan the area, then used the new bearing to reduce the circle.
Eventually we ended up in the parking lot of the Long Island railroad. There
in the back corner was our car, luckily unscathed and none the worse for wear.

Ping rocks.

~~~
blktiger
Did you guys get the Cops involved?

~~~
andor436
Yeah. Once we found the car we couldn't move it or even open it since it had
been reported stolen a few days before. My memory is foggy but I recall it
taking a couple hours for an officer to show up, and they were really confused
that we had found our own car.

------
davidw
This is a good one too, although not strictly ping related.

[http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

~~~
masklinn
There's also this legendary Amazon review, which _is_ strictly ping-related:
[http://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q](http://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q)

~~~
simonh
Good grief, I'd forgotten about that one. Hard to believe it's still up almost
15 years later. A true classic of the Amazon review genre. Who would have
thought they would become a cultural repository?

------
caractacus
[http://bash.org/?5273](http://bash.org/?5273)

Surely most people reading this will know the quote linked without having to
even click it.

~~~
kbart
It's not as fun as it was >10 years ago. Tablets and smartphones ruined it..

~~~
comex
Why did they ruin it? It's due to smartphones that I've had a similar
experience on at least one occasion. I couldn't find my phone, but I noticed
it was connected to the home Wi-Fi network and, since it was a jailbroken
iPhone, I could SSH into it. (It went to sleep aggressively, of course, but I
woke it up by dialing the number or something.) While the iPhone has a built-
in feature to remotely play a tone on the speaker, I couldn't seem to hear it
from anywhere in the house. So I tried using a command-line tool (might have
written it actually, don't remember) to activate the cameras and take a
picture with each; unfortunately the result was just two dark blurs.
Eventually I found it buried in a couch, the soft fabric muffling the
speaker...

If I were more sophisticated, I could have measured Wi-Fi RSSIs from it, or
tried to bring Bluetooth devices into range. Lots of ways to try to find
things nowadays, but none perfect!

------
dsr_
IN particular, that story is about 10Base2, where the topology is not hub-and-
spoke but a single cable that snakes from NIC to NIC, with BNC twist-lock
connectors and a T-junction at each stop. (And a required termination resistor
at the end to stop reflection...)

------
rhplus
The linked page appears to be a spammy copy of the original here:
[http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html](http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html)

It doesn't correctly credit the real author of ping:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Muuss](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Muuss)

~~~
js2
Thank you webmaster@arl.army.mil for seeing that Mike Muuss's pages have been
preserved, going on 15 years now.

Interesting note I hadn't read before: "This Web server was one of the first
50 Web servers on the InterNet, making it a pioneer in its own right."

------
yuchi
Do someone know how to run a command for every line emitted in a unix pipe? I
tried the oneliner in the linked story using Mac OS X’s `say`, but it doesn’t
work with pipes.

~~~
sheepz
ping goodhost | sed -l 's/.*/ping/' | while read line; do echo $line | say;
done

~~~
petercooper
Bit of a tangent, but using the voice "Tom" on OS X, saying "ping" says
"pling" instead. Fine with other voices but rather curious.

------
noonat
After a cross country move to a remote coastal town, my wife and I were left
at our destination with only a small portion of our possessions. The rest of
our stuff was making its way there with the hired movers.

I got into a strange situation where I needed my Mac Mini for something, but
it was still trying to connect to an old wired connection instead of the new
wireless one. I didn't have any of my cables or display adapters -- just a
keyboard.

Long story short: the Mac Mini has an internal speaker, and OS X comes with a
vocoder shell program. I managed to boot into the OS and launch terminal, and
blindly typed commands into it, piping the output to the vocoder app until I
got things working.

------
d0ugie
Ping fans, be sure to check out bing! Fun stuff and 97.2% accurate (not
really)! :)

> Bing is a point-to-point bandwidth measurement tool (hence the 'b'), based
> on ping. Bing determines the real (raw, as opposed to available or average)
> throughput on a link by measuring ICMP echo requests roundtrip times for
> different packet sizes for each end of the link.

[http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-
readme.shtml](http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-readme.shtml)

~~~
silverwind
This looks pretty ancient (source files dated 1997), and won't compile here.
Any maintained version?

~~~
gkelly
I'm a fan of nttcp, although it's not based on ping.

[http://linux.die.net/man/1/nttcp](http://linux.die.net/man/1/nttcp)

------
asmithmd1
Is it just my network administrator or do others drop outgoing Ping messages
at the corporate firewall? This has cost me and others more time than I would
like to admit for some vague "security" reason that he won't or can't explain.

~~~
dsr_
Start with a default-deny policy, the only sensible course. (Google "IP over
ICMP".) Note that some sysadmins need to verify external connectivity, so
allow ICMP echo reply messages to those IPs (or subnets, more likely).

Result: if your machine isn't in one of those blessed ranges, you never get a
response to a ping to an outside address. Most users don't complain, because
they don't even know what a ping is.

So, it's not just your company, but it's not general practice everywhere.

~~~
silverwind
Blocking ICMP is a questionable practice in my opinion. It generally just
complicates troubleshooting for a marginable gain in "security" and some
applications even require it for PMTU discovery.

If you're really worried about user tunneling out through various tricks,
you'd probably have to block the whole internet and apply a whitelist of
trusted destination hosts.

As a heavy ping user, this blockage always bothered me, so I started working
on a similar tool to get around this:

[https://github.com/silverwind/tcpie](https://github.com/silverwind/tcpie)

------
rcarmo
We once had an Ericsson MSC that only replied to _uneven_ ICMP packets due to
some bug.

Made it look like there was 50% packet loss on an otherwise perfectly good Cat
5 cable...

(edit: ICMP instead of IP)

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Checksum issue?

~~~
rcarmo
IIRC, there was nothing on the logs and they eventually shipped a fix. I was
there when it happened and was called over to have a look.

------
gbajson
And now, 2015, in my corporate networks ICMP messages are filtered by firewall
(they say that's due to security reasons). Is this the beginning of the end of
ping?

~~~
ProAm
ping will be the last thing to die before they turn the internet off.

------
vruiz
now I'm really tempted to add some voice notification function to pingd
[[https://github.com/pinggg/pingd](https://github.com/pinggg/pingd)]

