Waiting for your server to finish rebooting? Issue the command above and you will hear a beep when it comes online. The -i 60 flag tells ping to wait for 60 seconds between ping, putting less strain on your system. Vary it to your need. The -a flag tells ping to include an audible bell in the output when a package is received (that is, when your server comes online).

This will perform one of two blocks of code, depending on the condition of the first. Essentially is a bash terniary operator. To tell if a machine is up: ping -c1 machine { echo succes;} || { echo failed; } Because of the bash { } block operators, you can have multiple commands ping -c1 machine && { echo success;log-timestamp.sh }|| { echo failed; email-admin.sh; } Tips: Remember, the { } operators are treated by bash as a reserved word: as such, they need a space on either side. If you have a command that can fail at the end of the true block, consider ending said block with 'false' to prevent accidental execution Show Sample Output

Where < target > may be a single IP, a hostname or a subnet -sS TCP SYN scanning (also known as half-open, or stealth scanning) -P0 option allows you to switch off ICMP pings. -sV option enables version detection -O flag attempt to identify the remote operating system Other option: -A option enables both OS fingerprinting and version detection -v use -v twice for more verbosity. nmap -sS -P0 -A -v < target >

nmap accepts a wide variety of addressing notation, multiple targets/ranges, etc.

pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable. Basically the opposite of: ping -a server-or-ip.com which would beep when a server IS reachable. You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a: while true; do [ "$(ping -c1W1w1 server-or-ip.com 2>/dev/null | awk '/received/ {print $4}')" = 1 ] && date || echo 'server is down!'; sleep 1; done which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo. Notes: Requires beep package. May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker) Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box... sudo apt-get install beep

Usefull for when you don't have nmap and need to find a missing host. Pings all addresses from 10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.254, modify for your subnet. Timeout set to 1 sec for speed, if running over a slow connection you should raise that to avoid missing replies. This will clean up the junk, leaving just the IP address: for i in {1..254}; do ping -c 1 -W 1 10.1.1.$i | grep 'from' | cut -d' ' -f 4 | tr -d ':'; done Show Sample Output

This command uses ping to get the routers' IP addresses to the destination host as traceroute does. If you know what I mean..

The report mode of mtr produces a text formated result of the mtr run using the number of ping cycles stated by the command. This text file could then be attached to an email with ease. I use this also without the ">" portion when writing email from within mutt using VI from the command mode with ":r !mtr --report --report-cycles 10 Show Sample Output

PING parameters c 1 limits to 1 pinging attempt q makes the command quiet (or silent mode) /dev/null 2>&1 is to remove the display && echo ONLINE is executed if previous command is successful (return value 0) || echo OFFLINE is executed otherwise (return value of 1 if unreachable or 2 if you're offline yourself). I personally use this command as an alias with a predefined machine name but there are at least 2 improvements that may be done. Asking for the machine name or IP Escaping the output so that it displays ONLINE in green and OFFLINE in red (for instance).

Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it! Show Sample Output

Joker wants an email if the Brand X server is down. Set a cron job for every 5 mins with this line and he gets an email when/if a ping takes longer than 3 seconds. Show Sample Output

until (ssh root@10.1.1.39 2> /dev/null); do date; sleep 15; done In this case will execute "date" then "sleep 15" until we are able to ssh into server, such as after a reboot Could also be like: until ( ping 10.1.1.39 1> /dev/null); do echo "server 10.1.1.39 is down"; sleep 15; done Show Sample Output

When run on a mac, this command will bring up a dialog box in the Terminal when server HOSTNAME first responds to a ping.

I'd rather this one on Gnome, as I'm used to be listening some music while working. I've even created a bash function which receives ADDRESS as parameter.

Pings all the hosts on 192.168.1.0/24 in parallel, so it is very fast. Alive host IP addresses are echoed to stdout as pings are responded to. Show Sample Output

It really disables all ICMP responses not only the ping one. If you want to enable it you can use: sudo -s "echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all"

Audio acknowledgement for host availability. When running the command from a Linux systems, you can use "festival" or "espeak" instead of "say".

Returns a JSON object, by connecting to the 'test' endpoint of the Twitter API. Simplest way to check if you can connect to Twitter. Output also available in XML, use '/help/test.xml' for that Show Sample Output

# first install arp-scan if not have it arp-scan 10.1.1.0/24 .... show ip+mac in localnet awk '/00:1b:11:dc:a9:65/ {print $1}' .... get ip associated with MAC ` backtick make do command substitution passing ip to command ping Show Sample Output

Get the IP of a hostname.

Continue to execute the command in background even though quitting the shell.

The tee (as in "T" junction) command is very useful for redirecting output to two places. Show Sample Output

What do you do when nmap is not available and you want to see the hosts responding to an icmp echo request ? This one-liner will print all hosts responding with their ipv4 address.

Add to your bash profile to minimize carpal tunnel syndrome. Doesn't work with user@hostname but appending "-l user" works fine if needed. Works for ping as well.. complete -W "$(echo `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sed -e s/,.*//g | uniq | grep -v "\["`;)" ping Show Sample Output