Ping Sweep
What and Why
I wrote this application to help diagnose some odd network connectivity problems on my home network. The basic idea is to ping to a remote host with increasingly larger packets. As of right now, the packet sizes start at 32 bytes and increase by factors of two. Summary results are generated for various percentiles of the ping times and number of packets lost. Packets are considered lost for two reasons: socket timeout or corrupted payload on the echo packet.
This application relies upon the dpkt python package (http://code.google.com/p/dpkt/). It is included here as a subfolder. Finally, this module relies upon the use of raw sockets. You will need to run with elevated administrator permissions on Windows. On Linux simply run this tool using 'sudo'.
Initial inspiration for this tool came from various sources:
- http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/asyncore/
- http://www.commercialventvac.com/dpkt.html
- http://jon.oberheide.org/blog/2008/08/25/dpkt-tutorial-1-icmp-echo/
- http://www.python-forum.de/viewtopic.php?p=183720
- http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576662/
In the end I implemented my very own framework instead of copying one of those above. It was fun to learn something new about working with sockets.
Examples
Here is an example of the text output when I target my PC upstairs where I suspected problems with my ethernet cables in the closet:
C:\Projects\ping_sweep> .\ping_sweep.py 192.168.1.29
Ping Sweep
==========
target name: 192.168.1.29
ping count: 100
timeout: 1000 ms
pause time: 5 ms
Size (bytes) | Ping Times (ms) | Lost Packets
Payload Packet | min avg [std] max | All T C
------------------------------------------------------------
32 40 | 80.59 98.94 [ 20.64] 162.95 | 1 1 0
64 72 | 80.70 98.54 [ 23.29] 166.97 | 0 0 0
128 136 | 81.16 91.79 [ 17.75] 170.88 | 0 0 0
256 264 | 81.98 86.49 [ 5.74] 121.32 | 0 0 0
512 520 | 82.21 95.20 [ 28.57] 252.61 | 0 0 0
1024 1032 | 84.19 101.15 [ 24.22] 173.09 | 1 1 0
1472 1480 | 87.31 97.93 [ 5.54] 120.48 | 0 0 0
Next below is a nice result where I target my WiFi router to which I am directly connected now on my laptop. There are still the occasional delayed packets, but not as many as above, and all packets made the round trip just fine.
C:\Projects\ping_sweep> .\ping_sweep.py 192.168.1.254
Ping Sweep
==========
target name: 192.168.1.254
ping count: 100
timeout: 1000 ms
pause time: 5 ms
Payload Packet | min avg [std] max | All T C
Size (bytes) | Ping Times (ms) | Lost Packets
------------------------------------------------------------
32 40 | 0.38 0.53 [ 1.09] 11.35 | 0 0 0
64 72 | 0.38 0.57 [ 1.48] 15.29 | 0 0 0
128 136 | 0.39 0.43 [ 0.07] 0.85 | 0 0 0
256 264 | 0.40 0.60 [ 1.49] 15.43 | 0 0 0
512 520 | 0.40 0.74 [ 2.68] 27.44 | 0 0 0
1024 1032 | 0.49 0.72 [ 1.65] 17.12 | 0 0 0
1472 1480 | 0.52 0.72 [ 1.57] 16.31 | 0 0 0
