Question

Right, I have a PHP script at work where the server ping’s a client. The problem I am facing is that sometimes the server cannot contact the client although when I manually ping the client it ping’s successfully.

The ping command I am using is this ping -q -w 3 -c 1 < ipaddresshere >

What would be the best way of pinging the clients maybe 2/3 times leaving like a 2/3 second gap if a ping fails before a retry?

Answer 1

As you are in the unix environment, you can always make and then call a shell script to handle the looping and waiting. But I’m surprised that you can’t do that inside of php.

Also, i’m not sure about your sample ping command, the 2 different environments I checked seem to have different meanings for the options you mention than what you seem to intend. Try man ping OR ping --help

The script below should give you a framework for implementing a ping-retry, but I can’t spend a lot of time on it.

cat pingCheck.sh

#! /bin/bash -vx

IPaddr=$1

: ${maxPingTries:=3}
echo "maxPingTries=${maxPingTries}"

pingTries=0
while ${keepTryingToPing:-true} ; do
  if ping -n 3 -r 1 ${IPaddr} ;then
    keepTryingToPing=false
  else
    sleep ${sleepSecs:-3}
    if (( ++pingTries >= maxPingTries )) ; then
      printf "Execeeded count on ping attempts = ${maxPingTries}\n" 1>&2
      keepTryingToPing=false
    fi
  fi

done

I hope this helps.

P.S. as you appear to be a new user, if you get an answer that helps you please remember to mark it as accepted, and/or give it a + (or -) as a useful answer.