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In need of some common sense. I searched the net about below described issue but I couldn't get any clear or related information to solve it myself, so I reach out to this community, hopefully not bothering you with yet another question about pinging....

I got this laptop connected with wire to my router-modem and I got 4 mobile devices:

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab-A 2022 (from my kid)
  • Samsung A10 (2021) mobile phone (from my kid)
  • 2 x Samsung A3 (2017) All four connected via Wi-Fi on that same router-modem.

On my Windows 10 Home laptop I have running PRTG Network Monitoring tool, just to get a bit acquainted with it. This tool does ping devices as my for example my router. As expected I can ping this router using Command-Prompt (run as admin), too.

For some unfamiliar reason PRTG found both devices of my kid after an auto-discover run, but refuses to find(!) my devices. PRTG shows positive result for its ping-sensor. But why doesn't it find all four devices?

Then I tried pinging all devices with Command prompt (run as admin) from my laptop and here the Tab-A device of my kid can be pinged successfully but her phone responds with "Reply from IP-address laptop: Destination host unreachable". Why can PRTG ping her phone without problem?

My both devices only gives time-outs when being pinged as if they even do not exist....

I have no clue why 4 devices give these 3 different results. My router-modem does allow communication between devices, PRTG does show and the successful ping to the Tab-A confirms this too. So here should be no problem.

Both my devices have Avast Mobile Security, so I deleted this temporarily. Unfortunately without a positive result, so this protection app should not be the cause also.

I have tried to "copy" settings from my child's devices on my phones but also without result. Even connecting my laptop wireless doesn't give any better result.

Are those A3's too old then? Or do I lack proper knowledge of pinging?

Thanks in advance for your honest reaction and kind regards,

Aad

Aad Dijksman
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1 Answers1

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First thing to consider is that devices aren't required to respond to ping/ICMP, they can and some are setup not to respond for various reasons.

It might be worth editing your question to quickly clarify which devices are responding to ping, and which aren't, as reading through your question I couldn't keep track to be honest.

If it's the two older devices that don't respond, it could simply be the default in Android at that point in time was NOT to respond to ping, and that's changed in newer versions. Which version of Android is each of them running?

While it doesn't answer your question, some of the answers here (which may be a better place to post your question) https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/79301/need-to-enable-icmp-ping-response-from-phone point to settings / config files that can be altered on the devices to change whether they do / don't respond to ping. Also note in the comments that someone points out that even when the phone is responding to ping successfully (in their case only via IPv6) it only does so when the phone is awake. Once the phone screen is off it stops responding to ping, which from a battery saving point of view makes sense since in normal operation most people wouldn't want their device wasting battery power sitting there listening for inbound network traffic for no reason.

Keith Langmead
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  • Thank you for your response. Reading back I see that it has become a somewhat woolly story indeed. Both of my daughter's devices (the Samsung A10 and Samsung Tab-A) were found by PRTG, but both of my Samsung A3's were not. Age could be a reason, but I could only ping the Tab-A (the older of my daughter's two devices) from my laptop, not the other 3 devices. But to be honest, I hadn't thought of your suggestion about Android version. I'm going to take a closer look at this. Greetings, Aad – Aad Dijksman Jun 07 '23 at 08:41