“I realised a while ago that it would be a useful thing to
check, occasionally, that all the machines I’m responsible for are
still up. (This helps to minimise those embarrassing ‘Oh, I didn’t
know there was anything wrong with it’ conversations.)“Thus, the following pretty basic perl script, which I run from
/etc/crontab on my own desktop every couple of hours…”
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Linux Journal: An Overview of ping(Oct 13, 2005)