node-fping

A simple wrapper for fping

Requirements

Obviously, you need to have fping installed.

sudo apt-get install fping

Installation

npm install node-fping

Usage

Here is a usage example, with the results of just me hotspotted to my phone:

var fping = require('node-fping').subnet; // aliased to .network

fping('192.168.43.0/24', function(err, hosts) {
  // outputs: [  '192.168.43.1' , '192.168.43.63'  ]
  console.dir(hosts);
});

Caveats

Since I was the only use case for this, I did hardcode the arguments so that the code above will call /usr/bin/fping -r0 -aqg 192.168.43.0/24:

• -r0 means it will only try to ping each host once
• -a means only live hosts will be output to stdout
• -q means stop printing dead hosts to stderr
• -g means generate the hosts list from the given network

Also err will always be set as fping returns error code 1 unless every single host replies.

Todo

• make it properly async, fping will output an IP address as soon as it gets a reply
• allow pinging an array of hosts module.exports.hosts = function(hosts, callback) {}
• allow specifying CLI options as an object