From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2007-03-17T14:05:07+09:00
Subject: Re: The philosophy of failed pings

On Mar 16, 6:05 pm, Gary Wright <gwtm...@mac.com> wrote:
> On Mar 16, 2007, at 2:25 PM, Daniel Berger wrote:
>
> > I need some advice. I recently received a bug report for
> > Net::Ping::External class (part of
> > the net-ping package) where the user was getting false positives.
>
> > In his case he was pinging some bogus loopback address. The ping
> > command did not raise any error or warning, but it did have 100%
> > packet failure.
>
> I'm not sure I understand.  Net::Ping::External#ping(host) was
> returning true even though there was 100% packet loss to the host?

Yes. In all of my past experiences when that happened there would be
some additional output sent to stderr, or something sent to stdout
that warned you something was wrong, and so my code relied on that. In
this particular case there was no warning or error.

> I don't think #ping(host) should return true unless there has
> actually been a packet returned from the targeted host.
>
> Not sure if that answers your question though.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I'm leaning in that
direction.

Regards,

Dan