I needed to determine the IP addresses of all the hosts on a LAN from a Solaris 10 system. I knew that all of them will respond to pings. To do so, I used
fping. The fping
program will allow you to quickly ping a range of hosts.
fping (Maintained by Thomas Dzubin)
fping is a ping(1) like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a host is up. fping is different from ping in that you can specify any number of hosts on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists of hosts to ping. Instead of trying one host until it timeouts or replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to the next host in a round-robin fashion. If a host replies, it is noted and removed from the list of hosts to check. If a host does not respond within a certain time limit and/or retry limit it will be considered unreachable.
Unlike ping, fping is meant to be used in scripts and its output is easy to parse.
I downloaded the Intel architecture version of fping for Solaris 10 from Sunfreeware.com and installed it.
# gunzip fping-2.4b2-sol10-intel-local.gz
# pkgadd -d ./fping-2.4b2-sol10-intel-local
The following packages are available:
1 SMCfping fping
(intel) 2.4b2
Select package(s) you wish to process (or 'all' to process
all packages). (default: all) [?,??,q]: 1
Processing package instance from
fping(intel) 2.4b2
ZeroHype Technologies Inc.
Using as the package base directory.
## Processing package information.
## Processing system information.
3 package pathnames are already properly installed.
## Verifying disk space requirements.
## Checking for conflicts with packages already installed.
## Checking for setuid/setgid programs.
Installing fping as
## Installing part 1 of 1.
/usr/local/doc/fping/COPYING
/usr/local/doc/fping/ChangeLog
/usr/local/doc/fping/INSTALL
/usr/local/doc/fping/README
/usr/local/man/man8/fping.8
/usr/local/sbin/fping
[ verifying class ]
Installation of was successful. Program usage information is shown below:
# /usr/local/sbin/fping -h
Usage: /usr/local/sbin/fping [options] [targets...]
-a show targets that are alive
-A show targets by address
-b n amount of ping data to send, in bytes (default 56)
-B f set exponential backoff factor to f
-c n count of pings to send to each target (default 1)
-C n same as -c, report results in verbose format
-e show elapsed time on return packets
-f file read list of targets from a file ( - means stdin) (only if no -g specified)
-g generate target list (only if no -f specified)
(specify the start and end IP in the target list, or supply a IP netmask)
(ex. /usr/local/sbin/fping -g 192.168.1.0 192.168.1.255 or /usr/local/sbin/fping -g 192.168.1.0/24)
-i n interval between sending ping packets (in millisec) (default 25)
-l loop sending pings forever
-m ping multiple interfaces on target host
-n show targets by name (-d is equivalent)
-p n interval between ping packets to one target (in millisec)
(in looping and counting modes, default 1000)
-q quiet (don't show per-target/per-ping results)
-Q n same as -q, but show summary every n seconds
-r n number of retries (default 3)
-s print final stats
-t n individual target initial timeout (in millisec) (default 500)
-u show targets that are unreachable
-v show version
targets list of targets to check (if no -f specified)If I wanted to determine what hosts in the 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.255 range
exist and can be pinged, I could use the command fping -g 192.168.1.0
192.168.1.255.
# /usr/local/sbin/fping -g 192.168.1.0 192.168.1.255
192.168.1.0 is alive [<- 192.168.1.44]
192.168.1.1 is alive
192.168.1.6 is alive
192.168.1.7 is alive
192.168.1.33 is alive
192.168.1.44 is alive
192.168.1.255 is alive [<- 192.168.1.44]
192.168.1.2 is unreachable
192.168.1.3 is unreachable
192.168.1.4 is unreachable
192.168.1.5 is unreachable
192.168.1.8 is unreachable
192.168.1.9 is unreachable
192.168.1.10 is unreachable
<text snipped>
192.168.1.30 is unreachable
192.168.1.31 is unreachable
192.168.1.32 is unreachable
192.168.1.34 is unreachable
192.168.1.35 is unreachable
<text snipped>
192.168.1.40 is unreachable
192.168.1.41 is unreachable
192.168.1.42 is unreachable
192.168.1.43 is unreachable
192.168.1.45 is unreachable
<text snipped>
192.168.1.252 is unreachable
192.168.1.253 is unreachable
192.168.1.254 is unreachable
If I don't want anything displayed for IP addresses where there was no
response, I could use fping -a -g <start address> <end
address>, as in the example below.
# /usr/local/sbin/fping -a -g 192.168.1.0 192.168.1.255
192.168.1.0 [<- 192.168.1.44]
192.168.1.1
192.168.1.5
192.168.1.7
192.168.1.37
192.168.1.44
192.168.1.255 [<- 192.168.1.44]The 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.1.255 addresses
are network and broadcast addresses respectively, not hosts responding to
ping packets. The 192.168.1.44 address is the address of the
system from which I ran the ping command.
