Short: Network host monitor Author: mlelstv@serpens.rhein.de Uploader: mlelstv serpens rhein de Type: comm/net Architecture: m68k-amigaos pong is a utility that monitors the presence of hosts on the net using the ICMP ECHO protocol (aka 'ping'). History: After we got private access to the internet we had to fight many problems with unstable software and modems or ISDN links suddenly dropping connections. I wrote a shell script that pinged a couple of strategic hosts and routers. When a host answered a ping it was considered 'up', otherwise 'down' and a change in state was reported with the say command. This way I was alerted when there was a problem even when I was busy with other things. This script was started every few minutes by DCron (from Matt Dillon). This had the disadvantage that every few minutes a program used the hard disk, trashed SnoopDos output and slowed other programs down. pong does basically the same as the monitoring script. It takes a list of hosts from a configuration file, tries to ping these and report state changes on standard output. The messages are also read from the configuration file. You can redirect the messages to SPEAK: for audible reports or pipe the output to a shell so that any command can be executed when a host becomes reachable or unreachable. pong runs in infinite loop. You have to abort it with ctrl-c or the BREAK command. Usage: pong CONFIG/A,CHECK/K/N,RETRY/K/N,PRESET/S,TO/K: CONFIG/A the name of the configuration file CHECK/K/N n recheck a host every n seconds that was found alive the default is 300 seconds RETRY/K/N n if a host does not reply in n seconds it is considered down the default is 30 seconds PRESET/S do not report the initial state of each host TO/K the name of a redirection file. Only status messages are sent to that file. A shell redirection would also send possible error messages. The config file is a sequence of lines that are also parsed with ReadArgs. The template is: HOST/A,UP/K/A,DOWN/K/A,CHECK/K/N,RETRY/K/N HOST/A is the name of IP number of the host. UP/K/A is the string to be printed when the host becomes alive DOWN/K/A is the string to be printed when the host becomes unreachable CHECK/K/N and RETRY/K/N are optional CHECK and RETRY settings for this host that override the command line parameters pong is written for the AS225 TCP/IP protocol stack. It should also work with the socket.library emulation from Henning Schmiedehausen and AmiTCP. Changes: 1.1 considers a host down if a ping fails twice in a row. This avoids messages if a packet is lost on transit. Michael van Elst