Re: ping server

[Simon Kitching <simon@ecnetwork.co.nz>]

On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 16:50, John Summerfield wrote:
> debian user wrote:
> 
> > i would like to set up a ping server for my office.  I however have 
> > not found a simple way of  recieving a responce of "dead" or "alive".  
> > I am not to concerned about time etc?  I just want to ping a few 
> > servers and then send the results out in a email to a few key 
> > personal.  Right now I am doing "echo ping -c 3 server-name > file" 
> > for half a dozen boxes then i email the file to sevel people 
> > periodicly during the day.  I would like it to be a little eaiser to 
> > read i.e. "dead" or "alive" after the server name.
> > thank you,
> > alex
> >
> >
> Don't reinvent the wheel. Install mon.

>From the description above, I think the OP wants *statistics* about the
availability of servers, rather than an alerting system for server
failure. 

There are several good free monitoring packages, including "nagios",
"big sister" and mon.

  Nagios: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagios
  Big Sister: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bigsister

But for nagios at least, gathering statistics is not its main purpose.
It can be done, but requires a fair bit of reading of manuals to set up.

I'm not familiar with mon or Big Sister, so don't know how good they are
at statistics.

Regards,

Simon