Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

[Christian Boltz]

Hello,

ping -a (beep on ping success) is a quite useful command, but it can be 
annoying.

I'd like to have the exact opposite of it: beep when pinging fails.

I understand that this is slightly difficult because "ping success" is 
easier to detect (incoming package) than "ping failure" (no incoming 
package or firewall reject) - my proposal is to have a timeout for every 
package (if no reply package comes in) and beep if no reply is seen 
after the timeout is over.

For the timeout, the -W option could be used. The default timeout seems 
to be 10 seconds, which is OK.

Usecase / why this would be useful for me:
Basically for server monitoring. The exact usecase is that I have rented 
a "root server" and asked the hoster to exchange a broken harddisk.
With the "inverted" ping -a, it would be easy to notice when they switch 
off the server to replace the disk.

Please consider this feature for the next version of ping ;-)


(The iputils homepage does not list any bugtracker or similar, therefore 
I'm asking here.)


Gruß

Christian Boltz
-- 
"we will support any library from any repo combined with
any application" is something that NO ONE does.
Or if they do, they are insane, or lying, or both.
[Greg KH in opensuse-factory]
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Re: Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

[Randy Dunlap]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:35:32 +0200 Christian Boltz wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> ping -a (beep on ping success) is a quite useful command, but it can be 
> annoying.
> 
> I'd like to have the exact opposite of it: beep when pinging fails.
> 
> I understand that this is slightly difficult because "ping success" is 
> easier to detect (incoming package) than "ping failure" (no incoming 
> package or firewall reject) - my proposal is to have a timeout for every 
> package (if no reply package comes in) and beep if no reply is seen 
> after the timeout is over.
> 
> For the timeout, the -W option could be used. The default timeout seems 
> to be 10 seconds, which is OK.
> 
> Usecase / why this would be useful for me:
> Basically for server monitoring. The exact usecase is that I have rented 
> a "root server" and asked the hoster to exchange a broken harddisk.
> With the "inverted" ping -a, it would be easy to notice when they switch 
> off the server to replace the disk.
> 
> Please consider this feature for the next version of ping ;-)
> 
> 
> (The iputils homepage does not list any bugtracker or similar, therefore 
> I'm asking here.)

Couldn't you look for exit code (status) 1 and then do a bell/beep
(or play a sound file :)?

Or do you want ping to beep and then continue running?

---
~Randy
*** Remember to use Documentation/SubmitChecklist when testing your code ***

Re: Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

[Denys Fedoryshchenko]

 On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:49:37 -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:35:32 +0200 Christian Boltz wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> ping -a (beep on ping success) is a quite useful command, but it can 
>> be
>> annoying.
>>
>> I'd like to have the exact opposite of it: beep when pinging fails.
>>
>> I understand that this is slightly difficult because "ping success" 
>> is
>> easier to detect (incoming package) than "ping failure" (no incoming
>> package or firewall reject) - my proposal is to have a timeout for 
>> every
>> package (if no reply package comes in) and beep if no reply is seen
>> after the timeout is over.
>>
>> For the timeout, the -W option could be used. The default timeout 
>> seems
>> to be 10 seconds, which is OK.
>>
>> Usecase / why this would be useful for me:
>> Basically for server monitoring. The exact usecase is that I have 
>> rented
>> a "root server" and asked the hoster to exchange a broken harddisk.
>> With the "inverted" ping -a, it would be easy to notice when they 
>> switch
>> off the server to replace the disk.
>>
>> Please consider this feature for the next version of ping ;-)
>>
>>
>> (The iputils homepage does not list any bugtracker or similar, 
>> therefore
>> I'm asking here.)
>
> Couldn't you look for exit code (status) 1 and then do a bell/beep
> (or play a sound file :)?
>
> Or do you want ping to beep and then continue running?
>
 I wrote my own tool and call it ping watchdog (i so ideas about ping 
 watchdog in other projects, just improved it a little) :-)
 Probably it can be useful here, it can run script if ping fail more 
 than N packets... it is a bit undocumented and cryptic, but i can 
 improve it.

 http://code.google.com/p/sysadmin-tools/source/browse/trunk/pingwdog/pingwdog.c

Re: Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

[Christian Boltz]

Hello,

Am Freitag, 15. April 2011 schrieb Randy Dunlap:
> On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:35:32 +0200 Christian Boltz wrote:
> > I'd like to have the exact opposite of it: beep when pinging fails.
[...]
> Couldn't you look for exit code (status) 1 and then do a bell/beep
> (or play a sound file :)?

That would require that I know in advance when exactly the server is 
unreachable - but in this case, I wouldn't need to ping it ;-)

To have this working, ping would need an option "exit on error", which 
it doesn't have AFAIK.

A workaround is to run ping -c1 in a loop:

while true ; do
    ping -c1 $server || beep
    sleep 1
done

but I'd prefer to have something like this directly in ping ;-)

> Or do you want ping to beep and then continue running?

Yes, that's exactly what I want.


Gruß

Christian Boltz
-- 
> Ich moechte gern einige User die ihre Mails ueber einen Mailserver 
> (sendmail bevorzugt, postfix auch moeglich) scannen.
Dafür reicht ein Kopierer. Hosen runter, User draufsetzen und "Copy" 
drücken!   [> Ralf Thomas und Sandy Drobic in suse-linux]
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Re: Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

[Randy Dunlap]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:11:45 +0200 Christian Boltz wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Am Freitag, 15. April 2011 schrieb Randy Dunlap:
> > On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:35:32 +0200 Christian Boltz wrote:
> > > I'd like to have the exact opposite of it: beep when pinging fails.
> [...]
> > Couldn't you look for exit code (status) 1 and then do a bell/beep
> > (or play a sound file :)?
> 
> That would require that I know in advance when exactly the server is 
> unreachable - but in this case, I wouldn't need to ping it ;-)

I didn't follow that, but it's OK.

> To have this working, ping would need an option "exit on error", which 
> it doesn't have AFAIK.

'man ping' discusses exit status codes:

       If  ping  does  not  receive any reply packets at all it will exit with
       code 1. If a packet count and deadline are both  specified,  and  fewer
       than  count  packets are received by the time the deadline has arrived,
       it will also exit with code 1.  On other error it exits  with  code  2.
       Otherwise  it exits with code 0. This makes it possible to use the exit
       code to see if a host is alive or not.


> A workaround is to run ping -c1 in a loop:
> 
> while true ; do       If  ping  does  not  receive any reply packets at all it will exit with
       code 1. If a packet count and deadline are both  specified,  and  fewer
       than  count  packets are received by the time the deadline has arrived,
       it will also exit with code 1.  On other error it exits  with  code  2.
       Otherwise  it exits with code 0. This makes it possible to use the exit
       code to see if a host is alive or not.
>     ping -c1 $server || beep
>     sleep 1
> done
> 
> but I'd prefer to have something like this directly in ping ;-)
> 
> > Or do you want ping to beep and then continue running?
> 
> Yes, that's exactly what I want.


---
~Randy
*** Remember to use Documentation/SubmitChecklist when testing your code ***

Re: Feature request: "inverted" ping -a (beep on failure)

[Martin Topholm]

On Fri, 15 Apr 2011, Christian Boltz wrote:
> I'd like to have the exact opposite of it: beep when pinging fails.

I too have missed this feature (from the BSDs ping). Also I needed
adhoc tracking of multiple hosts. So I experimented with libevent2 and
some code from the BSD ping...

You can see the result here http://hoth.dk/xping/screenshot.jpeg
or http://hoth.dk/xping/xping-20110415.tar.gz .

> I understand that this is slightly difficult because "ping success" is 
> easier to detect (incoming package) than "ping failure" (no incoming 
> package or firewall reject)

I used the transmit interval for timeout. There's propably a lot of
corner cases I haven't thought about, but it works fairly well.

Regards, Martin