Question

I am currently creating a Dashboard app which is created with Ruby on Rails.

I have added a Server model and controller and the same for Ping.

What I want is to run the ping command on the given server IP address.

How would I go about this and log the results (status and M/S) into the database?

I would also like to know how to run the command every minute.

Answer 1

Probably the easiest way would be to open a TCP socket:

require 'timeout'
require 'socket'

def ping(host)
  begin
    Timeout.timeout(5) do 
      s = TCPSocket.new(host, 'echo')
      s.close
      return true
    end
  rescue Errno::ECONNREFUSED 
    return true
  rescue Timeout::Error, Errno::ENETUNREACH, Errno::EHOSTUNREACH
    return false
  end
end

ping('109.104.109.237')

These uses TCP ping rather than ICMP so a firewall would need to be configured as appropriate.

Running this every minute can be achieve using something like:

loop do
  # do your ping tests
  sleep 60
end

and running that process all the time. You can look at something like Daemons (http://daemons.rubyforge.org/) if you want an easy way to background it.