Determining whether a host is up or down

If you're going to attempt to enter a system, you first need to have a target to examine and explore, which requires finding out which hosts are online or live and which are not.

Exercise – working with ping

In this exercise, we are going to use the ping utility to check for live targets:

1. Open the Command Prompt on Windows or the Terminal in Linux.
2. Ping -c <number of pings> <target IP or hostname>.
3. Press Enter.
4. View the results.

If the -c is omitted, the ping command will continue to ping the provided hostname or address until you press Ctrl + C.

If you receive success replies from the target, the host is considered to be live. If you get a request timeout...