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man pages section 1M: System Administration Commands

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Updated: July 2017
 
 

fping (1m)

Name

fping - send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts

Synopsis

fping [ options ] [ systems... ]

Description

System Administration Commands                                       fping(1M)



NAME
       fping - send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts

SYNOPSIS
       fping [ options ] [ systems... ]


DESCRIPTION
       fping  is  a  ping like program which uses the Internet Control Message
       Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is  respond-
       ing.   fping  differs  from  ping in that you can specify any number of
       targets on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists  of
       targets to ping. Instead of sending to one target until it times out or
       replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next tar-
       get in a round-robin fashion.

       In  the default mode, if a target replies, it is noted and removed from
       the list of targets to check; if a target does  not  respond  within  a
       certain  time limit and/or retry limit it is designated as unreachable.
       fping also supports sending a specified number of pings to a target, or
       looping indefinitely (as in ping ).

       Unlike  ping  ,  fping is meant to be used in scripts, so its output is
       designed to be easy to parse.

OPTIONS
       -a   Show systems that are alive.

       -A   Display targets by address rather than DNS name.

       -bn  Number of bytes of ping data to send.  The minimum size  (normally
            12)  allows  room  for  the  data  that fping needs to do its work
            (sequence number, timestamp).  The  reported  received  data  size
            includes  the  IP  header  (normally  20 bytes) and ICMP header (8
            bytes), so the minimum total size is 40 bytes.  Default is 56,  as
            in  ping.   Maximum  is  the  theoretical maximum IP datagram size
            (64K), though most systems limit this to a smaller,  system-depen-
            dent number.

       -Bn  In  the  default  mode,  fping  sends several requests to a target
            before giving up, waiting longer for a reply  on  each  successive
            request.   This  parameter  is the value by which the wait time is
            multiplied on each successive request; it must  be  entered  as  a
            floating-point number (x.y).  The default is 1.5.

       -c   Number of request packets to send to each target.  In this mode, a
            line is displayed for each received response (this can  suppressed
            with  -q or -Q).  Also, statistics about responses for each target
            are displayed when all requests have been  sent  (or  when  inter-
            rupted).

       -C   Similar  to  -c,  but the per-target statistics are displayed in a
            format designed for automated response-time statistics  gathering.
            For example:

            % fping -C 5 -q somehost

            somehost : 91.7 37.0 29.2 - 36.8

            shows  the  response  time  in  milliseconds  for each of the five
            requests, with the "-" indicating that no response was received to
            the fourth request.

       -d   Use  gethostbyaddr(3NSL)  to lookup address of return ping packet.
            This allows you to give fping a list of IP addresses as input  and
            print hostnames in the output.

       -e   Show elapsed (round-trip) time of packets.

       -f   Read list of targets from a file.

            % fping < targets_file


       -g   Generate  a  target list from a supplied IP netmask, or a starting
            and ending IP.  Specify the netmask or start/end  in  the  targets
            portion of the command line.

            ex.  To  ping  the class C 192.168.1.x, the specified command line
            could look like either:

            fping -g 192.168.1.0/24

            or

            fping -g 192.168.1.0 192.168.1.255

       -h   Print usage message.

       -in  The minimum amount of time (in  milliseconds)  between  sending  a
            ping packet to any target (default is 25).

       -l   Loop  sending  packets to each target indefinitely.  Can be inter-
            rupted with ctl-C; statistics about responses for each target  are
            then displayed.

       -m   Send pings to each of a target host's multiple interfaces.

       -n   Same as -d.

       -p   In  looping or counting modes (-l, -c, or -C), this parameter sets
            the time in milliseconds that fping waits between successive pack-
            ets to an individual target.  Default is 1000.

       -q   Quiet. Don't show per-target results, just set final exit status.

       -Qn  Like -q, but show summary results every n seconds.

       -rn  Retry limit (default 3). This is the number of times an attempt at
            pinging a target will be made, not including the first try.

       -s   Print cumulative statistics upon exit.

       -tn  Initial target timeout  in  milliseconds  (default  500).  In  the
            default  mode,  this  is the amount of time that fping waits for a
            response to its first request.  Successive timeouts are multiplied
            by the backoff factor.

       -u   Show targets that are unreachable.

       -v   Print fping version information.


EXAMPLES
       The  following  perl script will check a list of hosts and send mail if
       any are unreachable. It uses the open2 function which allows a  program
       to  be opened for reading and writing. fping does not start pinging the
       list of systems until it reads  EOF,  which  it  gets  after  INPUT  is
       closed.  Sure the open2 usage is not needed in this example, but it's a
       good open2 example none the less.

       #!/usr/local/bin/perl
       require 'open2.pl';

       $MAILTO = "root";

       $pid = &open2("OUTPUT","INPUT","/usr/local/bin/fping -u");

       @check=("slapshot","foo","foobar");

       foreach(@check) {  print INPUT "$_\n"; }
       close(INPUT);
       @output=<OUTPUT>;

       if ($#output != -1) {
        chop($date=`date`);
        open(MAIL,"|mail -s 'unreachable systems' $MAILTO");
        print MAIL "\nThe following systems are unreachable as of: $date\n\n";
        print MAIL @output;
        close MAIL;
       }

       Another good example is when you want to perform an action only on hosts
       that are currently reachable.

       #!/usr/local/bin/perl

       $hosts_to_backup = `cat /etc/hosts.backup | fping -a`;

       foreach $host (split(/\n/,$hosts_to_backup)) {
         # do it
       }


       The following is an output example:

       % fping a.b.com x.y.z.net 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.3
         a.b.com is alive
         x.y.z.net is alive
         192.168.0.1 is alive
         192.168.0.3 is alive


       The following is an output example using the '-a' option:

       % fping -a a.b.com x.y.z.net 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.3
         a.b.com
         x.y.z.net
         192.168.0.1
         192.168.0.3

       The following is an output example using the '-c' option:

       % fping -c 3 a.b.com x.y.z.net 192.168.0.1
         a.b.com        : [0], 84 bytes, 51.1 ms (51.1 avg, 0% loss)
         192.168.0.1    : [0], 84 bytes, 0.08 ms (0.08 avg, 0% loss) [<- 192.168.0.4]
         x.y.z.net      : [0], 84 bytes, 70.6 ms (70.6 avg, 0% loss)
         a.b.com        : [1], 84 bytes, 60.9 ms (56.0 avg, 0% loss)
         192.168.0.1    : [1], 84 bytes, 0.09 ms (0.08 avg, 0% loss) [<- 192.168.0.4]
         a.b.com        : [2], 84 bytes, 40.6 ms (50.9 avg, 0% loss)
         192.168.0.1    : [2], 84 bytes, 0.11 ms (0.09 avg, 0% loss) [<- 192.168.0.4]
         x.y.z.net      : [2], 84 bytes, 68.8 ms (69.7 avg, 33% loss)

         a.b.com        : xmt/rcv/%loss = 3/3/0%, min/avg/max = 40.6/50.9/60.9
         x.y.z.net      : xmt/rcv/%loss = 3/2/33%, min/avg/max = 68.8/69.7/70.6
         192.168.0.1    : xmt/rcv/%loss = 3/3/0%, min/avg/max = 0.08/0.09/0.11

       The following is an output example using the '-C' option:

       % fping -C 3 a.b.com x.y.z.net 192.168.0.1
         a.b.com        : [0], 84 bytes, 41.7 ms (41.7 avg, 0% loss)
         x.y.z.net      : [0], 84 bytes, 66.6 ms (66.6 avg, 0% loss)
         a.b.com        : [1], 84 bytes, 50.7 ms (46.2 avg, 0% loss)
         x.y.z.net      : [1], 84 bytes, 62.6 ms (64.6 avg, 0% loss)
         a.b.com        : [2], 84 bytes, 44.9 ms (45.8 avg, 0% loss)
         x.y.z.net      : [2], 84 bytes, 69.5 ms (66.2 avg, 0% loss)

         a.b.com        : 41.74 50.72 44.94
         x.y.z.net      : 66.69 62.63 69.52
         192.168.0.1    : - - -

       The following is an output example using the '-e' option:

       % fping -e a.b.com x.y.z.net 192.168.0.1
         a.b.com is alive (18.9 ms)
         x.y.z.net is alive (9.51 ms)
         192.168.0.1 is alive (0.35 ms)

       The following is an output example using the '-g' option:

       % fping -g 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.6
         192.168.0.0 is alive [<- 192.168.0.4]
         192.168.0.4 is alive
         192.168.0.1 is unreachable
         192.168.0.2 is unreachable
         192.168.0.3 is unreachable
         192.168.0.5 is unreachable
         192.168.0.6 is unreachable

       The following is an output example using the '-s' option:

       % fping -s a.b.com x.y.z.net 192.168.0.1
         a.b.com is alive
         x.y.z.net is alive
         192.168.0.1 is unreachable

                3 targets
                2 alive
                1 unreachable
                0 unknown addresses

                4 timeouts (waiting for response)
                6 ICMP Echos sent
                2 ICMP Echo Replies received
                0 other ICMP received

          46.1 ms (min round trip time)
          58.7 ms (avg round trip time)
          71.3 ms (max round trip time)
                 4.153 sec (elapsed real time)


AUTHORS
       Roland J. Schemers III, Stanford University, concept and versions 1.x
       RL "Bob" Morgan, Stanford University, versions 2.x
       ZeroHype Technologies Inc. (http://www.zerohype.com), versions 2.3x and up,
       fping website:  http://www.fping.com

DIAGNOSTICS
       Exit status is 0 if all the hosts are reachable, 1 if some  hosts  were
       unreachable,  2  if any IP addresses were not found, 3 for invalid com-
       mand line arguments, and 4 for a system call failure.

BUGS
       Ha! If we knew of any we would have fixed them!

RESTRICTIONS
       Successful execution of this program requires that it  be  granted  the
       net_icmpaccess privilege.



ATTRIBUTES
       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:


       +---------------+------------------+
       |ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE  |
       +---------------+------------------+
       |Availability   | diagnostic/fping |
       +---------------+------------------+
       |Stability      | Volatile         |
       +---------------+------------------+
SEE ALSO
       netstat(1M), ping(1M), ifconfig(1M), rbac(5), privileges(5)




NOTES
       This     software     was    built    from    source    available    at
       https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland.   The  original   community
       source    was   downloaded   from    http://fping.sourceforge.net/down-
       load/fping.tar.gz

       Further information about this software can be found on the open source
       community website at http://fping.sourceforge.net/.



SunOS 5.11                        29 Feb 2008                        fping(1M)