Hmm… two posts in a row about stuff I’ve used for years that have now gone offline. There’s a statement here about the so called longevity of things in the digital era. Hey, looking at the calendar widget at the right of this blog, it just hit 10 years of age!
fping, apparently short for “Fast Pinger”, is a really handy tool I use when I want a simple way to monitor an IP address over a period of hours or days. A ping response implies that at least the Internet connection and router/firewall at the remote location are up – so any claimed problems would be further downstream. The built in ping in Windows does not have a date or time stamp, so it isn’t useful for longer term tracking. And a lot of intermittent problems really do need to be monitored over periods of time.
e.g. fping google.com -D -T -l -c -L F:\temp\log.txt
will get you results something like this (on screen and in the text file):
2017/11/10 17:13:57.780 : Reply[1] from google.com: bytes=32 time=42.6 ms TTL=56
2017/11/10 17:13:58.824 : Reply[2] from google.com: bytes=32 time=43.1 ms TTL=56
2017/11/10 17:13:59.869 : Reply[3] from google.com: bytes=32 time=43.1 ms TTL=56
There are a ton of other options… but, I haven’t played with them much.
Originally from http://www.kwakkelflap.com (which is now just serving ads). By Wouter Dhondt – Thanks Wouter!
I haven’t been able to find any new address for the tool, so, I’ve decided to host a copy.
This is the latest version that I could find (using archive.org from September 2015): fping300.zip
Not to be confused with fping on Linux (Unix?) which is entirely different.