Tag: icmp

ICMP – Internet Control Message Protocol

ICMP protocol is a bunch of error, queries and response messages that are helping us every day to troubleshoot and manage our networks. At least if you found yourself in a networking engineer role.

Network protocol “ICMP” is known as a control protocol because it is used for the purpose of administration and management within an IP network. Described in RFC 792 ICMP is a vital part of Internet protocol implementations, but it is not holding the application data. It carries the network status information. This protocol is being utilized to provide the details of:

  • issues during the core communications and interactions of applications within a network
  • network obstacles and congestion
  • out-of-the-way hosts accessibility

ICMP e.g. PING utility that is being utilized the Internet control message protocol in order to check out if the distant hosts is reachable and in addition it generates info about round-trip point-in-time. Moreover, TRACEROUTE is a supportive feature of ICMP. This element can spot the intermediate hops in between a specified source machine and an end machine. TRACEROUTE will also give us a way to find where in the middle of the network one hop is blocking the path of the packet being delivered.

ICMP header part organization

Every one ICMP packet will take one header of 8-byte along with a variable-sized section for data. The initial header’s 4 bytes will be unchanging and consistent. And opening byte will be reserved for the type of ICMP while second byte will be kept to store the ICMP code. Consecutively the 3rd and 4th bytes serve as the whole message checksum. But the rest of header’s 4–byte can be varied and conditional on the ICMP type plus its code. ICMP4 was introduced for the IP version 4.