Thread: ICMP ping network without specifying destination hosts

What is the protocol to send echo ICMP Raw packets to hosts on network without
specifying destination host. The purpose of this is to write a diagnostic to test
the network on the src host, such as pinging a network without actually providing
destination host. The following is a sample of what I tried....
sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_ICMP)

ip->protocol = IPPROTO_ICMP;
ip->saddr = inet_addr(dest_addr);

icmp->type = ICMP_ECHO;
connection.sin_family = AF_INET;
connection.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(dest_addr);
sendto(,,,&connection,,,);
recvfrom(,,,&connection,,,,);

Thank you. Yehuda

You can't send anything on a network without a destination IP address...

Thank you. I was under impression that we could broadcast a packet to a live network and get echo back without specifying the destination IP address to perform net-test diagnostics on the src network port. Thank you

Originally Posted by Yehuda

Thank you. I was under impression that we could broadcast a packet to a live network and get echo back without specifying the destination IP address to perform net-test diagnostics on the src network port. Thank you

Yes you can broadcast on networks where the router supports it... but even then you need the broadcast IP for that router... and you won't get a ping response on that address. The whole idea behind most ICMP functions is that of checking the status of a specific host server... not the machine you are sending from.

If you want to do a self-test... have the machine ping itself... i.e. destination IP = source IP