liboping โ Library to ping IPv4 and IPv6 hosts in parallel
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http://noping.cc/
About
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liboping was inspired by ping, libping and fping: It differs from these
existing solutions in that it can โpingโ multiple hosts in parallel using
IPv4 or IPv6 transparently. Other design principles were an object oriented
interface, simplicity and extensibility.
On top of liboping two command line applications have been built. โopingโ is
a drop-in replacement for ping(1) with very similar output. โnopingโ is an
ncurses-based application which displays statistics while pinging and
highlights aberrant round-trip times.
Features
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โข Support for multiple hosts.
โข Support for IPv4 and IPv6.
โข Object oriented interface.
Perl bindings
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Included in the source package of liboping are bindings for Perl. The code
resides in the bindings/ subdirectory and is compiled and installed by
default. To disable building the Perl bindings, call โconfigureโ with
โ--without-perl-bindingsโ.
Permissions
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On UNIX, special permissions are required to open raw sockets (raw(7)). If
you compile and install the โopingโ and โnopingโ binaries as normal user
(which is strongly suggested), you won't be able to use the binaries as a
normal user, because you won't have the permission to open raw sockets.
The โinstallโ target will automatically try fix this, if it is run with UID~0
(as user root). When on Linux, the capabilities described below will be
added. On other UNIXes the traditional Set-UID method (also described below)
is used instead. The build system will not abort if this fails, because there
are file systems which do not support either method. Also, the Debian
packaging system and possibly other scenarios only act as if they were
running as root.
Linux
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On Linux, the preferred method is to assign the required โcapabilityโ to the
binaries. This will allow the binary to open raw sockets, but doesn't give
any other permissions such as reading other users' files or shutting down the
system. The downside is that this mechanism is comparatively new: Assigning
capabilities to files is available since Linux 2.6.24.
To set the required capabilities, run (as user root):
# setcap cap_net_raw=ep /opt/oping/bin/oping
# setcap cap_net_raw=ep /opt/oping/bin/noping
Other UNIX
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Capabilities are a nice but Linux-specific solution. To make โopingโ and
โnopingโ available to unprivileged users on other UNIX systems, use the
traditional set-UID root solution. If your system supports โsaved set-UIDsโ
(basically all systems do), the applications will drop the privileges during
initialization and only regain them when actually opening the socket(s).
To set the set-UID bit, run (as user root):
# chown root: /opt/oping/bin/{,n}oping
# chmod u+s /opt/oping/bin/{,n}oping
Licensing terms
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liboping is licensed under the โGNU Lesser General Public Licenseโ (LGPL),
version 2.1 or later. The exact licensing terms can be found in the file
โCOPYINGโ included in the source distribution of liboping.
The โopingโ and โnopingโ utilities included in this package are licensed
under the โGNU General Public Licenseโ (GPL), version 2. The full licensing
terms can be found online at <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html>.
Author
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Florian โoctoโ Forster <ff at octo.it>
