Enabling Ping Replies in Windows Server 2008 and R2

A few people have emailed asking why Windows Server 2008 does not reply to pings (and how to enable it).

It doesn’t by default. No official reason why, but it probably has something to do with POD (Ping of Death) and Ping Flooding. Commonly used in Denial of Service attacks, POD is when a target server is sent an unusually large ICMP packet. For Ping flooding, if the target server is set to respond to pings, it may become bogged down and unable to effectively respond to other requests such as HTTP and FTP. Denial of Service attacks usually require a coordinated effort among multiple computers to halt a server - but it happens, and often!

To enable pings on the public profile (ie. over the Internet), go to Administrative Tools -> Firewall with Advanced Security -> Inbound Rules and find “File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request – ICMPv4-In)” -> Right-click and select “Enable.”

You can also open up the command prompt and type:

or type the following to disable the setting:

For Windows Server 2008 R2, type:

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