Do TTL values with ping always start at 255?

No, TTL values do not always start at 255. Many hosts start at lower values. TTL does not count "seconds" but hop count. It decrements by 1 for each hop between hosts. The TTL on my firewall is set at 64. It's 14 hops from my office to my house (normally) so when I ping my firewall, I see a TTL of 50.

When you ping localhost you'll see the default TTL for your IP stack, which is 128 in your case.

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RE:

Do TTL values with ping always start at 255?

Just a little extra to my question earlier :)

When I ping places does the SSL value always start at 255?

I thought it did...but pinging 127.0.0.1 (me) gives a TTL of 128...which means its bouncing through 127 routers on its way to me...which isn't true is it? Or does it not mean that at...

Ttl In Ping

Only very occasionally. Pings are what I hear when my 007 duties take me on board the Valiant class nuclear submarine ... there is a sonar operator who tends to pong a lot evey time he gets a ping (I think probably through too much curry)

TTL stands for "Time To Live". Basically, it's how long the packet (the ping) is allowed to keep trying to return. A TTL of 128 means your computer is giving that ping 128 seconds to come back. It's mostly arbitrary with modern connection speeds, though you can manually change the TTL with "ping -i 123" where 123 is the number of seconds, which can't be higher than 255.