Is it possible to ping a popular remote (public) server using Tails 0.17? If so, would it be unwise to try? I just want to know if the server is up or not.

The command ping is present in Tails 0.17 but I think it is inoperable, possibly because it wants to use UDP protocol, but Tails wants it to go through Tor, and Tor uses TCP protocol. There is a utility called tcpping which is available in Debian and should solve this, but this is not included in Tails 0.17.

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