There seems to be a problem with the ping program in some situations. In our case, some techs at Cisco were setting up 6.2 on some older Dell Optiplex machines and were getting very high packet loss and slow responses when pinging other machines on the network. The install was a Custom install, selecting the Everything option. The same install was done on 3 machines and all of them had the same problem. I found these newsgroups posts that describe the exact same symptoms. http://x68.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=608698334&search=thread&CONTEXT=959378404.1649999881&HIT_CONTEXT=959362605.1230176261&HIT_NUM=23&hitnum=0 http://x59.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN=624993945.1&mhitnum=0&CONTEXT=959378604.931069999 At first it looked like a networking problem but we checked all the equipment in a variety of ways and then tried testing other protocols like telnet, ftp and http and discovered they all worked perfectly. We then copied ping from another machine (Mandrake 7) and put it on the troubled machines. This new ping worked fine. For what it's worth, I also have a self-built machine at home with 6.2 and ping seems to work fine. I did a custom install on that machine but didn't select everything.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 10436 ***
I had the same problem with a RH6.2 on a Dell PowerEdge 2400. It's a real RedHat 6.2 (v.FR), not the one made by DELL. The ping diplay nothing, but when I take the /bin/ping on a RedHat 6.1 it work fine. With a sniffer (ethereal) I can see that echo request and echo reply are ok on the network (with the ping of the RH6.2). Perhaps it's just a display problem or something like that.