How to identify the Operating System using PING Command

Well as you all knows, To identify the name of OS(Operating System) using Nmap is very easy, but you can also identify the OS name with the help of Ping Command.

For Linux Distributions, we can use Nmap as shown below:

Syntax: nmap -O yeahhub.com

For Windows Distributions, you can use Zenmap which is the graphical version of Nmap.

Now for the same result, you can use Ping command to get the name of OS. Basically Ping is a computer network administration software utility which is used to find the availability of any host on the Internet Protocol Network (IP).

Usage of Ping:

Ping operates by sending ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) Echo Requests packets to the host and waiting for an ICMP Echo Reply.

Syntax: ping yeahhub.com

Now as you can see, it shows some TTL value which is currently 52, TTL(Time To Live) means how long a resolver is supposed to cache the DNS query before it expires and a new one needs to be done.

Here is the complete chart where you can see all TTL values of all servers.

You can get the short version of default TTL values by this table :

For Unix/Linux – TTL Value = 64
For Windows – TTL Value = 128
For Solaris/AIX – TTL Value = 254

Now to find the OS you need to calculate two things, one is PING TTL value and second is tracert hops.

For Tracert, you can use this below syntax:

tracert yeahhub.com

Tracert basically determine the hops between the Target and the destination.
So as you can see, the total No. of Hops are 12 and our TTL value is 52, by making the sum of TTL value + number of hops results 52+12 = 64, which means the server is a LINUX Machine.

For Windows 10, the default TTL Value is 128, that you can easily identify by using this command:

Syntax: ping -4 localhost

(This command only shows TTL = 128 if you are using Windows 10 OS)

This is how OS can be detected using PING and Tracert Command.

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