I have used PingPlotter for maybe a year now and although I am not a network guru, it has been useful. For some reason, no I can't ping outside of the network anymore. I installed Office 2007 2 days ago and ESET Smart Security 4.0 yesterday. That's the only software changes I know of. I contacted ESET and they showed me how to set an exception for PingPlotter. Any one know why I can't ping outside of the local network?

Hi, Weldon.

Can you ping *inside* your network? Do any hops show up?

If no hops show up at all (either when you ping inside or outside your network), then that points pretty clearly to software running on your machine. Office 2007 shouldn't be causing a problem, but ESET might be. We've tested ESET in the past with no problems, but it may require tweaks. Let us know what you're seeing and if it seems to be firewall, we'll pull out our ESET testing environment and see what we can find.

If one hop is showing, or if you can see results inside your network but not outside, then it's likely a problem with a piece of hardware (firewall, router, modem, etc.). In this case, changing settings on your machine won't do much to help you. Your best bet in this case is to check for settings on the most likely device (possible the one that's reporting back, or the one immediately after that), and see if ICMP is disabled. Also, sometimes bios updates fix/break things, so make sure you've not changed bios versions lately.

Let us know where this leaves you.

- Pete

We just created a knowledge base article about this problem:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/80