What is Pathping?

A. Pathping, a utility that's new to Windows 2000, is something of a cross between the Ping and Tracert utilities. The Pathping utility sends packets to each router on the way to a final destination over a period of time and computes results based on the packets that return from each hop. Because Pathping shows the degree of packet loss at any given router or link, you can determine which routers or links might be causing network problems. Below is the Pathping syntax:

pathping [-n] [-h maximum_hops] [-g host-list] [-p period] [-q num_queries] [-w timeout] [-T] [-R] target_name

Parameters:
-n: Doesn't resolve addresses to host names.
-h maximum_hops: Specifies maximum number of hops to search for the target; the default is 30 hops.
-g host-list: Lets you separate consecutive computers by intermediate gateways (loose source route) along a host-list.
-p period: Specifies number of milliseconds to wait between consecutive pings; the default is 250 milliseconds (1/4 second).
-q num_queries: Specifies number of queries to each computer along the route; the default is 100.
-w timeout: Specifies number of milliseconds to wait for each reply; the default is 3000 milliseconds (3 seconds).
-T: Attaches a layer-2 priority tag (e.g., 802.1p) to the ping packets that it sends to each of the network devices along the route. This helps identify network devices that don't have layer-2 priority configured. You must capitalize this parameter.
-R: Checks whether each network device along the route supports the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP), which lets the host computer reserve a certain amount of bandwidth for a data stream. You must capitalize this parameter.
target_name: Specifies the destination endpoint, identified either by IP address or host name.