Recommendations for a connection monitor
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I'm looking for a small, simple utility which will:
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monitor one or more hosts via ping
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perform a scan every x seconds
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play an alarm sound if scan fails n times
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F/OSS
That's it. Just a simple monitor with alarm. I don't need historical data or graph plotting or 50 MB installers. Just a small little utility that does this one job well. Google overwhelms me with a zillion commercial apps or monster suites like PRTG or Nessus etc.
Thanks in advance.
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We use Zabbix…..Way overkill for what you're looking for, but it is free if you dont take their support options. Bonus that it has a pfSense package for both agent and proxy too.
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Smokeping probably the best option without getting into one of the huge fully-featured monitoring systems. You'd have to write a script to do the alarm sound part but that's easy enough (it can execute commands on alarm).
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Thanks for the replies.
I already use Smokeping to track my historical connection data. I'm looking more for a Windows desktop utility so that I'm not the last to know when our link dies. I used to have a decent one 10 years ago but I forget what it's called now.
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Was it, The Dude? Its Windoze based and does alerting…One of my guys uses it a lot.
http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude
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Nope but I am familiar with The Dude. No, this was like a tiny little executable that didn't even have an installer. PingCheck or CheckPing or HostCheck or something like that. I don't know why I ever lost it in the first place. Very handy, small, simple, effective.
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Interesting. Something like that could come in handy. Let me know if you find it.
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I found it. While it didn't have all the features that I thought it did, I made do. It's called CheckHost and you can find it here:
http://www.ab-tools.com/de/software/checkhost/
I had to run the crapware installer in a VM to avoid contamination, but then it was easy to get just the program files and move them to my real machine. For sound alerts, I also grabbed NirCmd from NirSoft and have it use the speak function to have a pleasant Englishwoman tell me my connection is down.
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Cool! Thanks for the lead. ;D
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For each host I'm checking (4 in my case), I created a batch file in the same folder as CheckHost with these contents:
C:\Users\KOM\Software\NirCmd\nircmd.exe speak text "Google is not responding" 0 100
and save it as Google.bat. Create other batch files to handle other hosts. In CheckHost, I have an entry for Google DNS (8.8.8.8) and when down, I use Google.bat as the Start Program action.
