how to determine which side causes the intermittent ping failure

Question

Recently co-workers have been experiencing random connection drop problem with one of the servers. If I ping the server 10 times in a row from my windows client machine, I can see quite a few of them fail to get reply back. At this moment I am trying to decide if the problem is in the network between the server and the client machines or in the server itself. My question is, if I can always successfully ping the IP of the server from the server itself, can I say that the cause of the intermittent ping failure from other computers is likely in the network and not in my server?

Answer 1

One of tool I really like in windows is the tool named pathping. In should serve you well for this, as it pings each step along the way, and if there is routing involved, it should nail down the source of the problem.

Try this:

From working machine:

pathping -n server
pathping -n dodgymachine

From dodgy machine:

pathping -n server
pathping -n workingmachine

From server:

pathping -n dodgymachine
pathping -n workingmachine

(of course, substitute dodgymachine, workingmachine, and server with the actual IPs. I've included the -n switch, as doing lookups is probably not necessary).

Yes, there is some redundancy with running them both ways between all of those nodes, but being thorough never hurt anyone[citation needed].

What it does is basically the same thing, but it does so for any hops in between over some time (usually 10 minutes, if I remember correctly), and builds some statistics. If you run all of the above, you should be able to compare results.