[nycbug-talk] To ping or not to ping, that is the question...

[Isaac Levy]

Hey All,

I'm trying to ping. :)

Ok, so the situation is this- I'm attempting to determine weather or  
not a box is 'live', using some kind of external network probe  
(ping), hopefully determining if the box is up within 10 seconds or  
so- so my program can decide to do other things.

With that, the ping utility was not really designed to accommodate  
this need, on several counts:

Inside the box:
- to my knowledge, (and digging through the man pages), ping cannot  
bind itself to a particular network interface, which is a problem on  
boxes with multiple interfaces, with IP's all on the same subnet.   
(ping just finds the first IP route, and pings out on that interface.

Outside the box:
- to my knowledge, (and digging through the man pages), ping does not  
have any options which let the utility return some sort of boolean  
value for weather or not a packet was returned.

If I'm wrong on either of these points, I'd love for someone to tell  
me different- it would get me out of some tedious work here...

(sidenote- I know the implications of my question are a bit heavy,  
insomuch as there's *so much* that can happen to make a given ping  
fail, network latency, tons of factors... so using ping to determine  
weather a box is 'up' is more of an ontological debate than a simple  
yes or no answer...)

--
What I'm planning on doing, to solve my problem(s), is to write a  
small utility into my application which creates a network socket on a  
specified network interface, and pings from an IP assigned to it-  
returning boolean values to my program, so it can decide what to do  
(a fail-over type application).  This can be done pretty simply in  
Python (or similar), I'd just rather use a core system utility and  
keep it all in nice portable shell scripts...

Is this a sane idea, or are there some other ping type utilities out  
there that people know and love to do the same thing?  (Note- I'm not  
looking for some kind of Nagios/etc... type solution, I'm looking for  
a small stable widget to incorporate into my program).

Any thoughts, urls, chiding, anything- much appreciated...
(Arp related tools would also be a fine solution here, since I'm  
really focused on layer 2 [or perhps 3, IP], not services on the  
upper layers...)

Best,
.ike