computer online checker?

[ayu]

Ok so a friend asked a question which got me thinking a bit. But I can't seem to find a program that will solve his problem, and coding one in PHP isn't very effective. And I'm not really confident in trying to build one in C++ yet.

Scenario:

30 computers at work, have to tell a central workstation that they are online. Like they send a packet every 5 minutes, and if the server (workstation) doesn't get the packet in that time from a computer, it will see it as offline.

My friend wants this setup at his work so that he can just VPN + VNC to his work from home and see so that all computers are up and running in a single click, without having to do extra work.

Anyone got a effective solution? =)

[DNR]

??? there are apps out there to keep alive or monitor online status, via ping. Been around for years.

DNR

[G-Brain]

Let the central workstation ping the machines from like a bash script that does a sleep(5*60), writing the results to whatever you deem useful.

You can use the return value of the ping program ($? in bash).
It returns 0 (from main() ) when the machine is up, nonzero otherwise.

[ayu]

??? there are apps out there to keep alive or monitor online status, via ping. Been around for years.

DNR

Well yeah I know it's an option, but telling me that and saying that it has been around for some time doesn't really help me solve my friends issue.

Do you have a suggestion for a good application like that?

[G-Brain]

Code: Select all

hosts[0]="192.168.2.1"
hosts[1]="192.168.2.100"

while [ 1 ]
do
    date
    for host in ${hosts[@]}
    do
        ping -c 1 $host &>/dev/null
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]
        then
            echo "$host is down" 
        else
            echo "$host is up"
        fi
    done
    sleep 300
done

That just checks every member of the hosts array every 5 minutes, writing results to standard output. Should be easy to modify according to your friends' needs.

[bad_brain]

hm, if the box from which the monitoring is done runs on Linux Nagios for example (the OS of the monitored box don't matter, can be a MS one too):
http://www.nagios.org/
another one is Pandora, it also runs on MS:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pandora/

but ooook....both might be a little overkill....
check this one:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/multiping/
all it need to run is Java...

[ayu]

Thanks for the answers guys!

But I found something that suits him ^^

"Quick Ping Monitor"