No reply for ping command. What does this mean?

Ping is not the best tool to be used to test the availability of a remote network. Although ping can tell you that a network is reachable and send you response times, the lack of that information does not imply that the network is down. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Open your browser and go to yahoo.com and intel.com. Both come up right? Try pinging Yahoo ping yahoo.com then try pinging Intel ping intel.com Intel doesnt return any ping results. Intel probably disabled ping response for security reasons, like denying ping flooding.

Another issue with ping is that people often misinterpret the results. If you are getting a long response time, people often blame the endpoint. If you are in Windows, type pathping yahoo.com and you will see a combination of traceroute and ping, which gives much better information.


if your on a linux machine, you could use nmap instead

nmap -sP 192.168.x.0/24

For windows, netscanner.exe is an excellent tool (with a "live display" functionality that shows you host come and go in real time)

-- EDIT --

Since netscanner is not freeware anymore, but trialware (only the first 10 results will be shown), I went looking for alternatives and I came across this free product: https://www.mitec.cz/netscan.html

This website hosts many other useful related network tools


It means that your ICMP packet (ping) was silently discarded with no response sent. That might happen for several reasons:

  • Ping is disabled on router or (more likely) end point.
  • Network is congested or misconfigured