Ping puzzle

[kclark at CetaceanNetworks.com (Kevin D. Clark)]

John Chambers <jc at trillian.mit.edu> writes:

> One fun thing that I did once that was really useful:  I  hacked  the
> ping  to  run  in  "pipe"  mode,  where  it  accepted hosts (names or
> addresses) on stdin, pinged them all, and wrote to stdout whenever it
> got  a  reply.  This could be used as a subprocess from a parent that
> wants to ping a lot  of  hosts,  and  it  only  needs  to  start  one
> subprocess.  Maybe I should hack the linux ping to work this way. Now
> that linux is taking over the world, I may not need to do it on other
> kinds of machines in the future ...

Scary -- I wrote a program *exactly* like this a number of years ago.
I was writing Java network code, and I needed a way to efficiently
keep track of the reachability status of potentially thousands of
hosts.  I even started to port this code to win32 (where raw socket
access has always been....painful), but then politics killed my
project.

Unfortunately, I don't think that I have this code anymore.  But this
type of program isn't too hard to write, and I think that it is a good
way to solve this type of problem.

Regards,

--kevin
-- 
Kevin D. Clark / Cetacean Networks / Portsmouth, N.H. (USA)
cetaceannetworks.com!kclark (GnuPG ID: B280F24E)
alumni.unh.edu!kdc