You may have been there: you try pinging in Solaris (in my VM running Oracle Solaris 11 specifically) and you find that it's necessary to add a flag, like this:
ping -s (hostname or IP) 5
The flag, I think, means "send packets" and you can specify the number of packets after which to stop at "5". If you don't it pings away until Control-C is invoked.
But what crazy thing happens to get you to that point?
If you try
ping (hostname or IP)
... what happens?
Here's something that hopefully wins you a beer somewhere. The response is this: "ping" does not fail, but returns a simple confirmation. It does not return individual packets at default; that's what the flag is for. It responds to...
ping (hostname or IP)
like so:
(hostname or IP) is alive
You can thank me later.
