[TUHS] Ping

[Jim Mellander via TUHS]

I was unable to resist forwarding this Amazon review of the classic
children's book "The Story about Ping":

PING! The magic duck!

Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive
explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more
stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the
program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the
operating system and network infrastructure were finalized.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand,
choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping
packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends
a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the
same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little
packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From
the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the
Yangtze River).

The title character -- er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the
river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a
brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host
machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the
book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may
be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

Problems With This Book

As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is
no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options
well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book
solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the
ICMP packet structure.

But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my
bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix
Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows,
Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound
it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing
whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep
understanding. But I digress.

On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 4:28 PM Yayitz via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> I joined the mailing list recently! It's a pleasure to meet you all
> My name is Luis, I'm a CS student in Mexico :-) willing to contribute to
> TUHS soon
>
> Cheers :)
>
>
>
> Sent with Proton Mail secure email.
>
> On Monday, March 23rd, 2026 at 4:13 AM, Hellwig Geisse via TUHS <
> tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2026-03-23 at 18:56 +1000, Warren Toomey via TUHS wrote:
> > > Hi all, just checking that the TUHS list is still alive :-)
> > > Cheers, Warren
> >
> > *pong* ;-)
> >
> > And a big "thank you" for maintaining the list!
> >
> > Hellwig
> >
>