Windows 7 / Networking

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Possible Connectivity Issues

If the last item shown in the first section of PathPing output resembles the following example, PathPing was unable to communicate directly to the destination.

14   *   *   *

This might or might not indicate a possible connectivity problem, however. Although the device might be offline or unreachable, it is also likely that the destination-or a network node in the path to the destination-has been configured to drop the ICMP packets that PathPing uses to query devices. ICMP is disabled by default in many modern operating systems. Additionally, administrators often manually disable ICMP on other operating systems as a security measure to make it more difficult for malicious attackers to identify nodes on the network and to reduce the effects of some denial-of-service attacks.

Note Windows Firewall drops ICMP packets by default on public networks. Therefore, unless you connect to a domain controller or configure a network as private, Windows will not respond to ICMP requests by default.

If PathPing is unable to reach the destination, you should attempt to communicate directly with the application by using Telnet, as described in the section titled "Telnet Client" later in this tutorial.