I recently needed to check the availability (or rather pingability) of a system on a remote network. I didn’t have a VPN connection to that network but I did have administrative access to the network’s router which was a Draytek Vigor 2600.

As well as the expected web interface, the Vigor 2600 (as with many other Draytek routers) also includes a telnet server with a suite of command line tools.

To telnet to the router from both Windows & *nix systems you use the command:

telnet <router ip or hostname>

You will then be prompted for a password. This password is the same as the web interface password.

Once logged in, you can type ‘?’ and expect to be presented with a set of available commands which may look roughly like those below.

% Valid commands are:
upnp         ddns         exit         ip           ipf          ddos
urlf         p2p          log          quit         srv          show
mngt         sys          vpn          wan          port         wol

The ping command is a subcommand of ‘ip’ so to use it we type:

ip ping <host ip address>

The router will then send five pings to the target host and display a report of each ping, latency and packet loss.

I hope this comes in handy for others 🙂