Why does InetAddress.isReachable return false, when I can ping the IP address?

InetAddress byName = InetAddress.getByName("173.39.161.140");
System.out.println(byName);
System.out.println(byName.isReachable(1000));

Why does isReachable return false? I can ping the IP.

The "isReachable" method has not been worthy of using for me in many cases. You can scroll to the bottom to see my alternative for simply testing if you're online and capable of resolving external hosts (i.e. google.com) ... Which generally seems to work on *NIX machines.

The issue

There is alot of chatter about this :

• Here are other, similar questions :

  Detect internet Connection using Java

  How do I test the availability of the internet in Java?

• And even a reported bug on this same matter :

  http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4921816

Part 1 : A reproducible example of the problem

Note that in this case, it fails.

       //also, this fails for an invalid address, like "www.sjdosgoogle.com1234sd" 
       InetAddress[] addresses = InetAddress.getAllByName("www.google.com");
      for (InetAddress address : addresses) {
        if (address.isReachable(10000))
        {   
           System.out.println("Connected "+ address);
        }
        else
        {
           System.out.println("Failed "+address);
        }
      }
          //output:*Failed www.google.com/74.125.227.114*

Part 2 : A Hackish Workaround

As an alternative, you can do this :

// in case of Linux change the 'n' to 'c'
    Process p1 = java.lang.Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ping -n 1 www.google.com");
    int returnVal = p1.waitFor();
    boolean reachable = (returnVal==0);

The -c option of ping will allow ping to simply try to reach the server once(as opposed to the infinite ping which we're used to using at the terminal).

This will return 0 if the host is reachable. Otherwise, you will get "2" as a return value.

Much simpler - but of course it is platform specific. And there may be certain privilege caveats to using this command - but I find it works on my machines.

PLEASE Note that : 1) This solution is not production quality. Its a bit of a hack. If google is down, or your internet is temporarily slow, or maybe even if there is some funniness in your privileges/system settings, if could return false negatives (i.e. it could fail even though the input address is reachable). 2) The isReachable failure is an outstanding issue. Again - there are several online resources indicating that there is no "perfect" way of doing this at the time of this writing, due to the way the JVM tries to reach hosts - I guess it is an intrinsically platform specific task which, although simple, hasn't yet been abstracted sufficiently by the JVM.

I came here to get an answer for this same question, but I was unsatisfied by any of the answers because I was looking for a platform independent solution. Here is the code which I wrote and is platform independent, but requires information about any open port on the other machine (which we have most of the time).

private static boolean isReachable(String addr, int openPort, int timeOutMillis) {
    // Any Open port on other machine
    // openPort =  22 - ssh, 80 or 443 - webserver, 25 - mailserver etc.
    try {
        try (Socket soc = new Socket()) {
            soc.connect(new InetSocketAddress(addr, openPort), timeOutMillis);
        }
        return true;
    } catch (IOException ex) {
        return false;
    }
}

If you only want to check if it is connected to internet use this method , It returns true if internet is connected, Its preferable if you use the address of the site you are trying to connect through the program.

     public static boolean isInternetReachable()
    {
        try {
            //make a URL to a known source
            URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com");

            //open a connection to that source
            HttpURLConnection urlConnect = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();

            //trying to retrieve data from the source. If there
            //is no connection, this line will fail
            Object objData = urlConnect.getContent();

        } catch (Exception e) {              
            e.printStackTrace();
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

Just mentioning it explicitly since the other answers don't. The ping part of isReachable() requires root access on Unix. And as pointed out by bestsss in 4779367:

And if you ask why ping from bash doesn't, actually it does need as well. Do that ls -l /bin/ping.

Since using root was not an option in my case the solution was to allow access to port 7 in the firewall to the specific server I was interested in.

I am not sure what was the state when the original question was asked back in 2012.

As it stands now, ping will be executed as a root. Through the ping executable's authorization you will see the +s flag, and the process belonging to root, meaning it will run as root. run ls -liat on where the ping is located and you should see it.

So, if you run InetAddress.getByName("www.google.com").isReacheable(5000) as root, it should return true.

you need proper authorizations for the raw socket, which is used by ICMP (the protocol used by ping)

InetAddress.getByName is as reliable as ping, but you need proper permissions on the process to have it running properly.