Question

Putty takes too long to ping. What should I do?

Posted on December 20, 2017
Ubuntu 16.04 DNS Networking
Asked by mnyaaber

I’m installing bigbluebutton but when I ping the hostname in putty, the ping goes on and on without stopping. I sometimes have to wait for more than 30mins without success and then close the session. Please help.

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Moisey Uretsky

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 21, 2017

Accepted Answer

Whenever you are having an issue with connectivity you need to trouble shoot where the issue is occurring. There are few common areas where you can encounter an issue and then use that to figure out what to fix.

1. DNS You can use any of the following commands to see if your server is able to resolve the domain:

$ dig +short bigbluebutton.com
$ host bigbluebutton.com | awk '/has address/ { print $4 }'
$ nslookup bigbluebutton.com | awk '/^Address: / { print $2 }'

If DNS resolution fails you will need to review your nameserver configuration in

/etc/resolv.conf

2. Ping Next you would try to ping the IP address that the domain resolves to:

$ ping xx.xx.xx.xx

If you get a response then great, if not, you either have a connectivity problem, or it could be that the receiving server is blocking ICMP, which is common enough. That means the server on the other side will reject ICMP pings, but still allow you to connect to other open ports.

3. Traceroute If you want to review whether or not you have connectivity or where the ping fails simply run a traceroute:

$ traceroute xx.xx.xx.xx

This will show you every hop that your server takes to reach the destination, here you can see if the last ping fails, or if somewhere along the path there is an issue. If your ping fails half way through then you should contact your provider and provide them the traceroute so they can resolve it.

4. Telnet If the last ping fails, then the destination maybe blocking ICMP but you should still be able to connect to an open port to test you would use telnet:

$ telnet xx.xx.xx.xx port

If you are able to open a connection then the connection is working, if you aren’t able to then either the server is down, the path is broken, or the specific service listening on that port isn’t working. If you are requesting something through http, you would use port 80 and so forth.

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So with that general information you can better troubleshoot where your issue, in this case it would also be great to provide more information and any output from any commands you are running to help troubleshoot this specific issue further.