What causes pause when pinging?

[Alex Rice]

On Sunday, December 29, 2002, at 08:11  PM, RGould8 at aol.com wrote:

> shell "ping -c 1 www.apple.com"
>
>
> I then take the result and display it.  The question I have is that 
> sometimes this call takes a very long time. (15-20 seconds). 

I don't know what the delay could be. Maybe the DNS lookup for 
www.apple.com?

This actually is not a safe way to discover a "up" network. ping 
packets can be blocked and often are blocked at border routers.

>  Part of the reason I'm doing this ping is to see if the network is 
> active and that the user can reach the outside world.  (perhaps 
> there's a better way to do this?) 

I think you are on the right track. Maybe try hitting an HTTP server 
with a HEAD request instead, or a GET of a tiny file?

Perhaps there is a magical interface on Mac OS that says "good network 
config" or "bad network config" or something?

Other useful Unix commands would be ifconfig and netstat.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com