The ping command on the Cisco router can be used to gather a lot of useful information about potential network problems. Selecting the Extended Commands option to display the round-trip time can tell you about the delays on a link and variability of the delays. You may wish to capture a long-running sequence of ping data and plot the results to see the variability in round trip times. This is useful for troubleshooting intermittent network problems.
Sometimes a remote system will not have a route to the outgoing interface of a router from which you are running ping. In these circumstances, use ping's extended options to set the source address within the outgoing echo-request packet to that of another interface on the source router.
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