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

Question

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


        

Answer 1

InetAddress.isReachable is flappy, and sometimes returns unreachable for addresses which we can ping.

I tried the following:

ping -c 1 and check the exit status.

Works for all the cases i had tried where InetAddress.isReachable doesn't work.