NAME

fping - pings multiple hosts at once

SYNOPSIS

fping [ options ] [ hosts ]
  or
fping [ options ] -f hosts_file
  or
fping [ options ] < hosts_file

DESCRIPTION

fping is a ping(1) like program which attempts a TCP connection on a specific port to determine if a host is up. fping is different from ping in that you can specify any number of hosts on the command line. Instead of trying one host until it timeouts or replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next host in a round-robin fashion. If a host replies, it is noted and removed from the list of hosts to check. If a host does not respond within a certain time limit, it will be considered unreachable.

OPTIONS

-a Show systems that are alive.

-A Display targets by address rather than DNS name.

-e Show elapsed (TCP SYN/ACK) time of packets. Requires Time::Hires module to be installed.

-f hostsfile Read list of hosts from hostsfile. Default is to read from STDIN.

-h Print this usage message.

-P port Specify the port to connect to on the target host. It may be a numeric port or a service name. Default is http.

-t timeout Target timeout in milliseconds that the TCP three-way handshake must be completed by (default 8000 ms). timeout is only effective as multiples of 1000 unless (-e) is specified. This does not consider retries and backoff factors since that is built in to the TCP protocol itself. This is just the total maximum time.

-u Show targets that are unreachable.

-v Print fping version information.

THANKS

This perl script was inspired by the fping utility (written in C) originally by Roland Schemers now maintained by Thomas Dzubin.

Official fping website: http://www.fping.com/

Some differences are as follows: Written in Perl using a Net::Ping backend. Does not require root privileges to run. Uses TCP instead of ICMP (heavier network traffic). Can determine reachability of a host even if ICMP protocol is blocked as long as a TCP port is open and listening on the host.

AUTHOR

bbb@cpan.org (Rob Brown)

$Header: /usr/local/cvsroot/freeware/Net-Ping/demo/fping,v 1.8 2002/10/14 15:54:32 rob Exp $

$CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.roobik.com.:/usr/local/cvsroot/freeware

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2002, Rob Brown. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.