[c-nsp] Something like MTR, but forced path

[Ed Ravin]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 09:01:50PM -0500, Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET wrote:
> I'm basically looking for something I can run on Unix and
> give me a curses view of IPs I give it to ping at the same time.

You could use Mon:

  http://mon.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page

The server component will do the pinging and reporting of which hosts are
down.  It includes an command-line client that displays the current status.
You could hack on that (or script with it) to display the results in the
format that you want.

But the client/server architecure and other overhead might be more
work than you bargained for.

> Curses MTR bolds the lettering when it has a ping loss which I want
> to catch my eye.

In my shop, we have Mon set to write to our terminals when it has
something important to tell us.

> As an FYI, the problem I have is I'm having connection losses between my
> site and the wireless WISP's gateway. I think the packet is getting to the
> backhaul link at the site here, but not to the other end of the backhaul here.
> I want to run a set of pings [...]

That sounds like a job for Smokeping:

  http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/

It will run a set of pings on whatever you want and graph the results.
You'll be able to spot long-term trends as well as short-term outages.
ISTR it also has some alarming logic, so you might be able to have it
squawk at you when someone stops answering pings completely.

> I want something formalized since sending pings that just show
> a loss somewhere in the middle don't mean anything.

I've done that with Smokeping - tell Smokeping to ping everything in
a particular path.  Lining up the resulting graphs with records of
service outages is usually very informative.