multiping / News: Recent posts

MultiPing requires Java 1.5.0. Previously, if you tried to run it on an older version of Java it would just exit without any sort of notification.

Now, it will display a message box indicating that it requires Java 1.5.0 or later to run.

It requires Java 1.5.x (still in beta) and due to a yet unresolved bug in this version of Java, after running for awhile hosts will indicate a down state.

The new InetAddress.isReachable() functionality in Java 1.5.0 which MultiPing uses is bugged. The underlying native code never closes the OS socket, so after running MultiPing for some time, all the pings just start failing. The below bug in Sun's database tracks this issue:

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5061568

This has not yet been fixed in the latest snapshot beta release, but hopefully they'll have something for this soon.

One of the holdups with getting a release of multiping has been that Java has not provided a way to easily perform an ICMP echo (ping). As a result, the only option was using exec() to call the system's ping command and then parse the result. When doing this, there were difficulties in being able to enforce a timeout and things kind of stalled there.

Apparently, with Java 1.5.0 beta 2, support has been added for determining the reachability of a host (which uses ICMP echo).... read more