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The best ping story I've ever heard

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Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#41

Post by andrea_s »

andor436 wrote: post #37

I once recovered a stolen car with ping. It was 2002 (2003?), and we had just launched Zipcar in New York. Being a naive start-up we had perhaps not the most stringent security measures in place to prevent fraud and theft. Sure enough, a couple of weeks in and one of our cars went missing. Calls to the member went unreturned, and it became clear that the member was not who they claimed to be and had no intention of r…

Well, that's impressive! It truly sounds like something out of a bad tv show...

Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#42

Post by blktiger »

andor436 wrote: post #37

I once recovered a stolen car with ping. It was 2002 (2003?), and we had just launched Zipcar in New York. Being a naive start-up we had perhaps not the most stringent security measures in place to prevent fraud and theft. Sure enough, a couple of weeks in and one of our cars went missing. Calls to the member went unreturned, and it became clear that the member was not who they claimed to be and had no intention of r…

Did you guys get the Cops involved?

Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#44

Post by andor436 »

blktiger wrote: post #42
andor436 wrote: post #37

I once recovered a stolen car with ping. It was 2002 (2003?), and we had just launched Zipcar in New York. Being a naive start-up we had perhaps not the most stringent security measures in place to prevent fraud and theft. Sure enough, a couple of weeks in and one of our cars went missing. Calls to the member went unreturned, and it became clear that the member was not who they claimed to be and had no intention of r…

Did you guys get the Cops involved?

Yeah. Once we found the car we couldn't move it or even open it since it had been reported stolen a few days before. My memory is foggy but I recall it taking a couple hours for an officer to show up, and they were really confused that we had found our own car.

Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#46

Post by noonat »

After a cross country move to a remote coastal town, my wife and I were left at our destination with only a small portion of our possessions. The rest of our stuff was making its way there with the hired movers.

I got into a strange situation where I needed my Mac Mini for something, but it was still trying to connect to an old wired connection instead of the new wireless one. I didn't have any of my cables or display adapters -- just a keyboard.

Long story short: the Mac Mini has an internal speaker, and OS X comes with a vocoder shell program. I managed to boot into the OS and launch terminal, and blindly typed commands into it, piping the output to the vocoder app until I got things working.

Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#47

Post by comex »

kbart wrote: post #27
caractacus wrote: post #3

http://bash.org/?5273 Surely most people reading this will know the quote linked without having to even click it.

It's not as fun as it was >10 years ago. Tablets and smartphones ruined it..

Why did they ruin it? It's due to smartphones that I've had a similar experience on at least one occasion. I couldn't find my phone, but I noticed it was connected to the home Wi-Fi network and, since it was a jailbroken iPhone, I could SSH into it. (It went to sleep aggressively, of course, but I woke it up by dialing the number or something.) While the iPhone has a built-in feature to remotely play a tone on the speaker, I couldn't seem to hear it from anywhere in the house. So I tried using a command-line tool (might have written it actually, don't remember) to activate the cameras and take a picture with each; unfortunately the result was just two dark blurs. Eventually I found it buried in a couch, the soft fabric muffling the speaker...

If I were more sophisticated, I could have measured Wi-Fi RSSIs from it, or tried to bring Bluetooth devices into range. Lots of ways to try to find things nowadays, but none perfect!

Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#48

Post by gkelly »

silverwind wrote: post #39
d0ugie wrote: post #31

Ping fans, be sure to check out bing! Fun stuff and 97.2% accurate (not really)! :) > Bing is a point-to-point bandwidth measurement tool (hence the 'b'), based on ping. Bing determines the real (raw, as opposed to available or average) throughput on a link by measuring ICMP echo requests roundtrip times for different packet sizes for each end of the link. http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-readme.shtml

This looks pretty ancient (source files dated 1997), and won't compile here. Any maintained version?

I'm a fan of nttcp, although it's not based on ping.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/nttcp

Re: The best ping story I've ever heard

#49

Post by elementai »

rcarmo wrote: post #20

We once had an Ericsson MSC that only replied to _uneven_ ICMP packets due to some bug. Made it look like there was 50% packet loss on an otherwise perfectly good Cat 5 cable... (edit: ICMP instead of IP)

We've had a 3rd party router configured to balance traffic based on even/odd last octet. Add faulty hardware and DHCP to the mix, and here you have really hard to debug problem.
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