Thanks very much for your excellent description Enrique.
On a new installation of an old version of Debian, I have a problem
reaching any Internet address and, trying to work through the problem
on my own, I thought that such a high-level doc for ping would be
useful in troubleshooting it; but I couldn't find anything suitable
either. I wanted something that concentrates on the user's box rather
than getting into the whole network theory; i.e., what happens when
you enter the ping command: the chain of processes, what they do, and
how to find out if they were successful, and what goes out and what
comes into the box. Because ping requires so many other processes to
work, this might be a useful way to troubleshoot a connectivity
problem like mine. Would this approach be useful to other people do
you think? If it would, and I could get some technical help with it, I
would be prepared to produce such a document. Would this be useful?