I have Ping Plotter 2.40 installed on my laptop that I use for network management / monitoring. When running the app, all the hops to any destination, show 100% packet loss EXCEPT for the final destination device. I've installed the app on my desktop workstation and it works fine for all the same hops. I've switched out from an orinoco wireless card to a 3com 10/100 card. I tweaked the choices of "packet type" with no luck. I've rebooted several times, nothing makes a difference. I do have a few other networking monitoring tools installed. I'm guessing there's some sort of conflict or .DLL incompatibility. The other related apps are "Network Stumbler", "CommView" packet sniffer and "Essential NetTools".

Any ideas about why I'm seeing this behavior? It's strange...

Thanks, Mikey

Hi, Mikey.

What you're seeing usually results from ICMP TTL expired packets being blocked by a firewall / similar. Make sure your desktop and laptop are sending / receiving through the same gateway on your network - if you're connecting through a different firewall, one may be blocking these and the other not.

I'm not a regular user of any of the 3 applications you listed. The most likely problem would be if any of them act as a firewall.

In 2.40, there shouldn't be any DLL conflicts - as it doesn't install any .DLLs. You can test your basic networking by going to a command line and testing the TRACERT application. If you're getting good results with TRACERT but not Ping Plotter (a situation that has happened maybe 2 times in the history of Ping Plotter, and is extremely unlikely), then we may have some issue that is local software related. Otherwise, it's likely to be a network issue of some kind (network firewall on your machine, or further out that is different from the workstation that works).

Post back here what you find with TRACERT and after you've verified the network similarities between your laptop/desktop, and also after you've checked for firewalls and disabled them (temporarily) on your machine and tried it again. If that doesn't point to the problem, then we'll keep digging.

- Pete

Pete,
Thanks for the info. I should have checked that myself. I discovered that a piece of software installed the "Net Firewall" service on my network stack. I wasn't aware that it was there. As soon as I removed it, that fixed everything. Thanks again for your help.

Mikey

That was exactly my problem and your pinpointing the firewall was exactly my fix. I'm using Trene Micro Internet Security software and the personal firewall was active. Once deactivating it, everything worked fine. My Ping is now Plotting.