multi node ping tool

[Hubert Feller]

I am looking for a ping tool which can use a textfile containing a list of nodes and ping them all. The desired output should contain the nodes which are down as well as the nodes which cannot be resolved.
Is there something like this available?

Your help is appreciated.

[Rainer von Bongartz]

You might take a look at fping from

http://www.fping.com/

Ragards
Rainer

[G. Vrijhoeven · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

How about a shell script.

#!/usr/bin/ksh
for server in `cat serverlist.txt`
do
TEST=0
TEST=`nslookup $server | grep -q Address`
if [ $TEST -ne 0 ]
then
ping server -n 3 | grep loss | awk -F, '{ print $NF}' | awk -F% '{ print $1}' | grep -q " 0"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then echo "$server is alive, at $(date)"
fi
fi
done

HTH,

Gideon

[Mark Grant]

You can simplify this script quite a bit

for hostname in `cat textfile`
do
output="looks fine"
ping $hostname -n 1 || output "looks broken"
echo "$hostname $output"
done

[Hubert Feller]

Hi all

Thank you very much for your quick help. All answers are eally valuable and I will adapt the solution to my needs an try them.

Greetings from sunny switzerland

Peter

[Geoff Wild]

Just a thought, but you may want to check out BigBrother:

http://bb4.com/

Big Brother monitors System and Network-delivered services for availability. Your current network status is displayed on a color-coded web page in near-real time. When problems are detected, you're immediately notified by e-mail, pager, or text messaging.

Rgds...Geoff

[Ralph Grothe]

Peter,

for more serious monitoring purposes of a whole server farm I'd rather stick with fping as Rainer already suggested.
fping has the great advantage of sending out Echo_Requests asynchronously.
Therefore it is better suited for monitoring.
For instance the mon utility ( http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/ ) uses fping.
fping also can read a list of hosts to ping from a file, and has an extra -f option.
Another choice would be to use the Net::Ping Perl module from CPAN.
It gives you the ability to chose from different protocols (e.g. tcp, udp, icmp) because ICMP requires root privilages, and many firewalls drop ICMP Echo Requests silently.
For the same reason are you free to select a port to ping.
Because the SSH port 22 is often not block you could ping boxes even behind firewalls.