I am trying to help my mom with her internet, but she lives far away and is not very tech savvy. Can I ping her router with her public IP address to see if it connected to the internet?
Consumer routers usually have pings on the external interface blocked so people can’t just ping random IPs to find one they can hack.
Should be fairly easy to talk her though opening cmd and running a ping
If her ISP has any measure of security, no.
However some ISPs portals (like mine, on AT&T) will actually let you know if the ISP provided router is online and - sometimes - interact with it. You just have to sign into the account (in this case, your mom’s) via the website - same place you go to pay the bill.
Your best bet for parents is FaceTime.
The minimum she’ll need to know is using a mouse and keyboard. Then you just direct her to where to click.
In addition to what /u/Sol33t303 said, if she has one of the larger ISPs you may be able to find troubleshooting tools by logging into her account. Many of these routers have built-in speed test and the ability to restart them remotely. Sometimes the ISP retains access to those tools for themselves, but sometimes they offer a way for customers to access them.
In the future you could install a Raspberry Pi with a VPN directly connected to her router via ethernet. It would give you a device on the network (behind her NAT) that you could reach if the router is online and allow you to troubleshoot issues with wifi or other devices. Just make sure it’s up to date and fairly secure, otherwise you might not be the only one with a backdoor.
You probably won’t be able to ping her router from outside of her network. If her ISP doesn’t offer those tools, the next best thing would probably be to contact the ISP support line on her behalf - maybe have her on a conference call so she can authenticate and grant permission to you. That way you can help translate what they are saying.
It really depends if the public IP that is provided via your gateway (cable, DSL, etc.) response to ICMP. As others mentioned there is a big possibility that the gateway does not respond to ICMP requests. if you have the option to change it on the gateway, then the should work. Otherwise, I don’t think you’d be able to successfully ping the gateway’s public IP address directly. One way to get around this would be to set up port forwarding on your router to a system on the network that is powered and responds to ICMP requests successfully. I can’t think of what the port for ICMP off the top of my head (I think it’s 7). As the last resort, you can enable DMZ on the router if you’re having issues setting up the port Ford. I would suggest that you remove the DMZ rule as fast as possible, as that would expose a local area network client to the internet directly.
I have added Raspberry Pi with Tailscale to parents house.
So I can connect to their home network and even change router settings without remote desktop/teamviewer or opening any ports.
long term the best thing to do is set up a computer on her network with teamviewer or similar and set it to unattended connection so you can just connect and interact with her network from the inside.
If you can’t connect then either the computer isn’t on or the network is having a problem somewhere.
I’ve already pinged your mom’s router, 6/10 would ping again.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 thx for the laugh… I was ponging her last year! ☺️
Try setting up BQM https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality
I think the best way is login into the router. Most of have public gui open