CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ping
Matteo Monti
Matteo Monti

Reputation: 8980

What service should I use to detect if a client is online?

I am developing a very simple script to monitor the uptime of a set of internet connections. Basically I have a set (in the order of hundreds) computers running continuously for long amounts of time (in the order of months).

Each of them is connected to a different consumer grade internet connection that I want to test. Basically what my script does right now is to ping google every few seconds, then monitor when the connection is up and when it is down.

Now, I was wondering: is it okay to do something like this? I would be pinging only once every, say, 10 seconds, so that definitely shouldn't look like a DoS attack, but still I was wondering if there is some more proper way to do this: could it be that a ping answer could be refused because I asked for it too many times in the recent past?

Or maybe, are there services on the internet that are just dedicated to answering pings? Something like pingme.net that is fully dedicated to answer my pings? I would like to get this right.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 39

Answers (1)

ojblass
ojblass

Reputation: 21630

There is software called Nagios which is designed to monitor farms of servers. In our installation we use cron to run a perl script to phone home to the nagios server every ten minutes. In addition to ping it also monitors the remote machines for disk space and certain processes that we want to have running. The best thing about Nagios is that it is free and has a lot of documentation on the web. I know I am not directly answering your question; however, I hope that I am giving you something to consider. You can read more information on Nagios here.

Upvotes: 1

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