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[2010-06-13 02:28 UTC] php at richardneill dot org
Description: ------------ Surprisingly, PHP is missing the ability to ping another host (and check it's alive). So I'd like to make a request to add it. I'd suggest using something like fping rather than standard ping, as this is more script-friendly - for example, fping can be made to return immediately as soon as it discovers that a given host is alive. For example: fping -q -B1 www.php.net I know that there is Net_Ping available via PEAR, but often PEAR extensions aren't available on many hosting environments; likewise it's awkward to package a PHP web-application when the PEAR extension isn't already packaged for the distro. Is ping suficiently fundamental to be considered core? Test script: --------------- This command should either exist in 2 forms, or have several options. Typical use cases are: 1. Is machine X alive (and responding to Pings) 2. Can I do a DNS lookup + route to that machine 3. What is the packet loss fraction. This is easy enough to do by using exec(), but it would be nice to have a native function. Thanks. PatchesPull RequestsHistoryAllCommentsChangesGit/SVN commits
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This is not going to work in most PHP environments because doing raw-socket ICMP requests, like ping does requires root access. You will notice that your ping binary is setuid-root on your machine, so unless you are running PHP as root, doing it from within PHP simply won't work. If you do have root access, it isn't that hard to do with a socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, getprotobyname('icmp')) call, but since it wouldn't work for most people, I don't see the point in adding it to PHP.But the reason the exec() works is because you are starting a new setuid-root process to do it. There is no way to do it from a non-root process, which means you can't eliminate the exec(), which means a PHP implementation would internally have to do exec('ping') which makes no sense.Agreed: php would have to internally exec('ping'). That's not especially pretty, but it's no uglier than having to explicitly do it. The advantage is that the code (and all error cases) have to be handled only once within PHP, rather than by ten thousand different end-users :-)