The current version of mass-ping / graph-mass-ping is: v1.1.2, released 2016-03-26
The concept behind 'mass-ping' goes like this:
- Start pinging every address on one (or more) subnets
- Then, do something -- like reboot a switch or flip from a primary path to a secondary path or apply some configuration change
- And watch how the pings behave -- if your high-availability schemes (VRRP / HSRP / GLBP / vPC / NIC TEAMing / etc) is behaving the way you designed it, then perhaps your targets miss a few pings, but then start returning them reliably again.
- Then again, if something is misconfigured, perhaps you isolate that subnet for seconds or even minutes.
- And, oddly enough, perhaps the behavior varies by host. Perhaps some NAS heads fail over to their secondary head smoothly, and others do not.
- Mass ping gives you a feel for all this. And leaves behind a .csv file.
- Run 'graph-mass-ping' against this .csv file (or against a directory of .csv files), and it produces .png files which illustrate the behavior:
Green '!' for returned pings, Red '.' for missed pings.
'mass-ping' is a way to validate the transport-side of highly-available networks and their associated highly-available hosts.
Inspired by Dartware's MacPing, back in the early 1990s.
--sk
Stuart Kendrick
Seattle, WA USA
stuart dot kendrick dot sea at gmail dot com
