PingPartnerThe program saves the information and generates a web page, graphing the results. For an example, see http://pingpartner.com/64.72.228.17-hour.html You can use this program to monitor your upstream connection, but for best results, you will partner with someone on a different Tier1 provider to check the availability of your servers on a different backbone. You might want to find a couple of different people on many different backbones. For example, I wrote the program to monitor my upstream provider. My Tier1 is Teleglobe (by way of 2 intermediate Tier2's). I'd like to watch my availability to people on, say, Sprint, UUNET, and Savis. I'll try and find someone on those networks to run the program PingPartner, with my server names and I'll run PingPartner to check their server names (Hence the "Partner" part of the name). They don't have to be directly connected to the Tier1 (just like I'm not). The idea is that, through co-operation, we can all get better info on how our servers are seen by people around the world. I want to check that pingpartner.com, www.pingpartner.com, ftp.pingpartner.com, mail.pingpartner.com or 205.210.140.30 are all visible to people everywhere. I could also check on router status or anything else that has an IP address or FQDN. Requirements: The program is written in VisualBasic5 and is 82kB (when running in NT4 it takes 3.4MB of RAM). There is a VB5 config program that is 86kB, which is used to visually manage the config file, but you can hand edit it with a text editor instead. When running, the program uses a timer to check on what sites to ping every minute. At that point, each site is pinged, the result logged to a txt file (for each of the time intervals: hour, day...), calculations are made for statistics, and a web page is created. The more sites that are to be worked on, the bigger the load. I haven't done any major load testing yet, but it appears to run at a 3% load (P3/450 writing to a drive across the network) for 1 sec, with 10 sites checked every minute. Tested on: Features: Can ping many sites, at varying intervals (minimum, 1 minute). Can output graphs for the past hour, day and week (month and year coming later). Output can be placed in any directory on the local network, for each site. The data for the charts never grows in size (there are txt files for each site for each time interval: hour, day,...). Cost: Postcard-ware! If you like the program and
find it useful, send me a postcard from your town. Dean Brown, 48 Devondale Ave, Toronto, ON, M2R
2E2, Canada
Current Version:
When looking for a partner:
Feature Request/Bugs/Comments: Email
Known Bugs/features not implemented: Feature n/i: charts/data collection for month and year not implemented yet Feature n/i: multiple charts on the same page not implemented yet Feature n/i: IP charts not implemented yet
Updates: This last page updated: May 23/2002 |