ping

The Story of the PING Program

I love finding little gems like this: The Story of the PING Program.

The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting "Ping, ping, ping..." once a second, and he wandered through the building wiggling Ethernet connectors until the sound stopped. And that's how he found the intermittent failure.

Getting Ping statistics with PHP

[Note: Since writing this post, I've created the Ping class for PHP, which incorporates three different ping/latency/uptime methods for PHP, and is a lot more robust than the script I have posted below.]

I recently needed to display some ping/server statistics on a website using PHP. The simplest way to do something like this is to use the built-in linux utility ping, and then parse the results. Instead of doing complex regex with the entirety of ping's output, though, I also used a couple other built-in linux utilities to get just what I needed.

Here's how I got just the response time of a given IP address:

<?php
$ip_address = '123.456.789.0'; // IP address you'd like to ping.
exec("ping -c 1 " . $ip_address . " | head -n 2 | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $7}'", $ping_time);
print $ping_time[0]; // First item in array, since exec returns an array.
?>

The above script will ping the given IP address, and simply pull out the response time in milliseconds. You can further parse the response time to just be the numeric value by running it through substr($ping_time[0], 5).

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