Question

I want to run a JavaScript code to ping 4 different IP addresses and then retrieve the packet loss and latency of these ping requests and display them on the page.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

You can’t do this from JS. What you could do is this:

 client --AJAX-- yourserver --ICMP ping-- targetservers

Make an AJAX request to your server, which will then ping the target servers for you, and return the result in the AJAX result.

Possible caveats:

• this tells you whether the target servers are pingable from your server, not from the user’s client
  • so the client won’t be able to test hosts its LAN
  • but you shouldn’t let the host check hosts on the server’s internal network, if any exist
  • some hosts may block traffic from certain hosts and not others
• you need to limit the ping count per machine:
  • to avoid the AJAX request from timing out
  • some site operators can get very upset when you keep pinging their sites all the time
• resources
  • long-running HTTP requests could run into maximum connection limit of your server, check how high it is
  • many users trying to ping at once might generate suspicious-looking traffic (all ICMP and nothing else)
• concurrency – you may wish to pool/cache the up/down status for a few seconds at least, so that multiple clients wishing to ping the same target won’t launch a flood of pings