Allowing a machine on a dynamic IP to ping?
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I have ping blocked and I want to run a server status monitor from my cell phone that uses pings every 5 minutes. What's the best way to accomplish this as it doesn't appear that I can allow ping for a specific MAC address. Thanks in advance for help.
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Even if you could allow for ping from specific mac address, mac address is only viable on the same layer 2 network. So from your cell phone how would that work exactly?
What exactly are you pinging?? Pfsense wan? Something on the same wifi network?
How does pinging pfsense wan tell you a server is up?
What exactly are you looking to monitor status of?? And a cell phone doesn't seem like the best place to do that from - there are many monitoring solutions on the internet, many of them FREE for limited number of devices. You could have it alert you if goes down to your cell phone, etc.
Allowing icmp pings is not the end of the world from a security point of view either..
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Sounds like going from my cell phone isn't a good option. I'm trying to ping my pfsense wan as I sell internet to tenants and need to know if the pfsense router ever goes down. Are you able to recommend any monitoring solutions that I can run in Windows 7?
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why run it on your own box… Why not let a free service do it for you - and send you an email if it goes down ;)
https://uptimerobot.com/
50 Monitors, Checked Every 5 Minutes, Totally Free!There are countless others like that.
You can view their IPs that could be checking monitoring from here
https://uptimerobot.com/locations
So you can add them to your firewall rule to only allow them to ping you for exampleAttached you see the history of it monitoring my home connection.
And I just blocked icmp, I turned alerts back on so I could show you an email example. You can send that to a sms email, or buy sms alerts for cheap.. Should get an alert example can attach in a few minutes.
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So much time and effort saved. Thank you!
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Just got the alert my home connection was down. I changed the firewall to block icmp.. So you see the dashboard shows it down and got email that is was down.
You can setup free email to sms, but that doesn't always work depending on your carrier..
I then set the firewall to allow ping again - and bam got alert that back up.
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I set it up to go to an email address that my wife and I share. With the frequency she checks her email, this will work perfectly. I'm already fully setup and received a successful ping, now disabling the rule that enables ping access to test and I should be good to go. Great stuff. Thank you so much.
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Try setting up the email to SMS.. I just turned that on and blocked icmp again.
Attached is sms alert.
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You have to pay to play for the SMS feature. I'm going to test this out for a month and then opt into the SMS. Thanks again.
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That is only if you use the pro sms, they have a email to sms feature.. Where you pick your carrier and then put in your phone number. This is FREE! I posted the alert I got from SMS to my phone. And I promise you I have not given them a dime..
Email to SMS doesn't always work or can be delayed which is why they want you to have a pro account and use true SMS..
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Uptimerobot.com has been working great for my public server. Now I need to address my internal nodes. Is there any app you recommend that I can run that pings all of my internal nodes and will alert me if one goes down?
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you want to run something internally and notify you if down? Lots of options here!
I run domotz pro.. I run it on a VM, but you could run it on a raspberry pi. Its not free, but its only 36$ year I think. They even sell hardware if you want to run it on.
https://www.domotz.com/So I get alerts on my phone, emails, etc. when something goes down on my local network..
Prtg would be another option - free you can do like 100 monitors. Which could be more than just ping. And also get alerts. If all your devices are on the same layer 2 you could prob use something like fingbox. Or something as simple as smokeping could also be used even with multiple network segments
I take it you want the same sort of alerting.. Want to know when stuff is down while your not there.. Then domotz would really be the way to go… I have it setup to alert me when my son's phones connect and disconnect from my network (they no longer live with us). So I know when say my son is at the house to pickup his son (my wife watches the grandson)... It really is pretty slick.. It has vlan support which its little brother the flingbox does not do.
You can even get info from switch interfaces, etc.. Some screenshots attached from mine off my phone. BTW you don't need to be on your wifi or anything to view this info.. its an app you install on your phone and you pull this info from their servers.. Your domotz box at home phones home to update this info, etc. So if your internet is down - you will also know that..
Now that I think about it this would of solved your first problem as well ;) If you run it at home and want to know if your home internet is down, etc.
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Great info. I'll check them out. Thank you for the help.
