Name: Colin McMillen
Email Address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: none.
Preferred User ID: COLINM
Planned Contribution:
The most immediate contribution I have to make is Net::Ping::External, a
module which interfaces with the "ping" utility on many systems. It
presently provides a single function, ping(), that takes in a hostname
and timeout and returns true is the host is alive, false otherwise. More
functionality, such as pinging multiple hosts, sending more than one
ICMP packet per host, may be added in the future.
Support currently exists for interfacing with the standard ping
utilities on the following systems:
MSWin32, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, IRIX, and AIX.
More systems will be added as soon as any users request them.
The reasoning behind this module is as follows:
* ICMP ping is the most reliable assessor of whether a remote host is
alive.
* However, there is no way to achieve direct ICMP access on most systems
unless one has access to root or administrator privileges. (For
instance, the standard Net::Ping module has no way of performing an ICMP
ping without these special privileges).
* The system's "ping" command uses ICMP and does not usually require
privileged access.
* While it is relatively trivial to write a Perl script that parses the
output of the "ping" command on a given system, the aim of this module
is to encapsulate this functionality and provide a single interface for
it that works on multiple systems.
A drawback which has been discussed:
* If there is a trojan "ping" program in the user's path, we'd be
calling the trojan with this module. This "vulnerability" will be
explicitly stated in the POD for the module, but it is generally not
considered to be a major risk, since any user with a trojan "ping" will
probably eventually invoke the system "ping" anyhow.
I have attempted to contact the author of Net::Ping to see if it would
eventually be possible to add support for calling Net::Ping::External
through a new protocol option called "system" or "external". However, I
have not heard back from him yet.
This module has been discussed by several people, on the website
www.perlmonks.org. I had originally suggested that this functionality be
added straight to Net::Ping, but the general consensus was that it would
be better as a separate module that Net::Ping could interface with. One
person pointed out the possible trojan vulnerability, as listed above.
Description of this module in module list format:
Name DSLI Description
------------- ---- --------------------------------------------
Net::Ping::External adpf Cross-platform interface to "ping" utilities
Info
----
COLINM
Thank you for your consideration.
Colin McMillen
--
print sort map{sub{map{push@_,shift;"@_\n"}@_}->(split)}<>
