help with Cron job

[Gus Mestousis]

What would be the best way to go about writing a cron job that pings a node every 5 minutes and outputs the data to a log file?

[Peter Kloetgen]

Hi Gus,

first command: crontab -e to edit the crontable

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * ping ip_of_host >> /directory/logfile_you_want

everything in one line, you can also do this with SAM( routine tasks ).

Allways stay on the bright side of life!

Peter

[Ian Dennison_1]

command is as followsm,...

date >>/var/adm/logs/ping.log
ping [hostname] -n [count] >>/var/adm/logs/ping.log

where hostname is the host to ping, and count is the number of packets to send.

crontab entry,...

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /tmp/script

where /tmp/script is the script with the ping command.

Or else you can just enter the ping command straight on the cron line, instead of /tmp/script.

Hope this helps! Are you having problems with network connectivity or response time?

[someone_4 · Accepted solution]

I am thinking you are wanting to monitor servers?


This one will write to a file


#!/bin/sh
LANG=C
### The hostnames file is a file with all the hostsname you want
### to monitor in a column
HOSTNAME_FILE=hostnames
for host in $(cat $HOSTNAME_FILE)
do
ping $host -n 1 | grep -q '1 packets received'
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
echo "$host: OK"
else
echo "$host: FAIL" >> host_down.log
fi
done


This one will send you an email

#!/bin/sh
LANG=C
HOSTNAME_FILE=hostnames
for host in $(cat $HOSTNAME_FILE)
do
ping $host -n 1 | grep -q '1 packets received'
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
echo "$host: OK"
else
echo "$host: FAIL" | mailx -s "hostdown" richard
fi
done

[Mark Greene_1]

try this script:

#!/bin/ksh
# script: /usr/local/bin/ping_node
remote_node=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx # ip address here
echo date
/usr/sbin/ping $remote_node -n3
exit $?

and launch it from cron like this:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/local/bin/ping_node >> /var/tmp/ping_node.log 2>&1

please keep in mind I've not tested this, caveat emptor and all that.

HTH
mark

[Gus Mestousis]

All the solutions were great.
Thanks for your fast replies, and great info.

The purpose of the cron job is to monitor a line. There is 2 nodes that I have to ping, andhave been getting complaints about. i just want to have a log with line info, by sending different size packets across, and seeing what the connection is.

Thanks again!

[someone_4]

Ohh yeah .. add the path to mine at the top..

#!/usr/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/sbin/ping:/usr/bin/:${PATH}
export PATH

Thoose paths always get you when you are doing cron scripts.

Richard

[Sanjay_6]

hi Gus,

you can have this entry,

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/sbin/ping host_name -n count >/your_log_file 2>&1

you can set the count as 5 so that the ping is tried 5 times and then it exits.

Hope this helps.

regds

[Patrick Wallek]

Probably what would be better to do is:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * ping host_name -n 2 >> logfile 2>&1

So that both stderr and stdout go to the logfile

[thebeatlesguru]

following is my cronfile:
03 11 * * * /usr/bin/ok >> /home/pin/ok.log 2>&1
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * ping 202.96.232.8 -n 2 >> /home/pin/ping.log 2>&1

/usr/bin/ok is a shell script
i find second mission is done,and i can find ping.log,but first mission is not done,i cant find ok.log.
why?