Probably the most usable tool from the Cisco cli is extended ping! It is one of those tools that doesn't really help you actually solve the problem but it gives you a comfortable felling that it is doing something...

My first job was working for the railways and in those days it was called the data processing department. I had written a reporting program using COBOL and embedded SQL on a DB2 database. The feedback was that the program took log to run so I added some code to time and log the query. I also displayed the seconds the query was running on the screen. The next day at work everyone asked me what I'd done to make the query faster! I had actually never optimized the query except to make the modification to the display. In seems that people though it was running faster because there was a visual prompt of progress.

And that is why the extended ping is so kewl. Problem is that Linux and Windows have meh versions of ping but there are versions that cut the mustard as an add-on tool.

• For Linux there is prettyping; and

• For Windows there is powerping.

Both these versions emulate the good old classic, extended ping.

Linux:

Windows:

Honourable mention: Ping Tracer

* Ronald works connecting Internet inhabiting things at Fusion Broadband.