ping-multi

Interactively ping one or multiple hosts.

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

Motivation

A Perl implementation which is easy to install and is also cross-platform.

Description

Ping-multi reads hosts from a file and sends ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to them. This is the same as the standard "ping", only executed in parallel for many hosts.

The results are displayed in an interactive curses text console which features the following:

• "Hostname" or "Resolved IP" view of the hosts
• Statistics about the ping results of each host:
  • Last round-trip-time (RTT)
  • Packet loss %
  • Average RTT
  • Minimum RTT
  • Maximum RTT
  • Standard deviation of the RTT
  • Received and Transmitted packets count
• Ping history:
  • simple view showing received (.) and lost (X) reply packets
  • scaled view which additionally visualizes the RTT value using the numbers between 0 and 9

You can select the statistics forwards and backwards using the lower "s" and upper "S" keys, similar to the "Vim" behavior.

Installation

The program depends on the following additional Perl modules:

• Curses
• JSON
• Statistics::Descriptive

On Debian/Ubuntu you can install them using the following command:

sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl libjson-perl libstatistics-descriptive-perl

Example

Ping multiple hosts specified directly on the command-line; you can also provide just one host:

sudo ./ping-multi google.com github.com

Ping multiple hosts specified in a file; you can also add more single hosts directly as additional command-line arguments:

sudo ./ping-multi -f sample.list

Ping hosts synchronously; this comment explains when this ping method is useful:

sudo ./ping-multi -S 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.15

Making ICMP ping requests requires "root" privileges on Linux.