[TriLUG] OT: Amiable ping target

[Aaron Joyner]

Brian Henning wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>   Pardon my ignorance...but is there an IP somewhere out there that is 
> specifically set up to be a ping target for checking connectivity? 
> We're having some serious issues with our DSL here lately, and I want 
> to set up a task to monitor it with pretty high resolution, say, 
> around one ping per second (I have a feeling some of its frequent 
> flakings are only seconds in length, but enough to interrupt our VPN).
>
> Obviously, doing this sort of thing would require a target (or more 
> probably, list of targets) that are highly reliable themselves, to 
> avoid false down indications.  So I'd probably create a list of N 
> targets, and each would only see a ping from me every N seconds unless 
> one failed, in which case the process would ping the next target on 
> the list immediately.
>
> My concern, of course, being a [hopefully] nice little Net citizen, is 
> not wanting to irritate anyone by taking about 302kB out of their 
> transfer quota every hour (3600 pings * 84 bytes each), unless they're 
> intending to be so generous.
>
> In other words, I have a feeling I shouldn't just randomly choose some 
> hosts (unless I choose a huge number of them...a possibility).  Hence 
> the question.
>
> And as a sideline question, if there's a nice utility out there 
> already to do something like that (take a list of hosts and ping one 
> every X seconds and report on the success), I'd love to know about it.
>
> Thanks a bunch as always!
> ~Brian

I'm surprised no one mentioned smokeping, by Tobias Oetiker, the author 
of RRDtool and MRTG.  You can find more information here: 
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/smokeping/

It gives a lot more information about latency than you really need (it's 
more suited to Jon's problem), but it does the trick nicely for noticing 
connectivity problems, and generates beautiful graphs in the process.  
 From a quick googling, there are packages for both Debian and Ubuntu.

Aaron S. Joyner