[TriLUG] OT: Amiable ping target

[Shane O'Donnell]

mtr is also worth looking at, plus it has an interesting XML output option.

Shane O.

On 8/26/05, Aaron Joyner <aaron at joyner.ws> wrote:
> 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
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-- 
Shane O.
========
Shane O'Donnell
shaneodonnell at gmail.com
====================