icmp echo requests.

This library provides functions that have similar behavior as the unix command-line utility ping. In particular, both emit ICMP echo requests and wait for responses. This library uses a haskell implementation of ICMP rather than invoking `binping`. This avoids the costly process of starting a child process. Additionally, there are greater opportunities for reusing sockets. The cost of this is that the user must ensure that one of these is true:

• The kernel parameter net.ipv4.ping_group_range has been configured to allow pings to all IP addresses. (preferred solution)

• The process is running with the the CAP_NET_RAW capability.

• The process is running as root. (worst solution)

ping

Objective

This library provides high-performance functions that issue ICMP echo requests and wait for responses, measuring the elapsed time. It is intended to be cross-platform as possible, and it may use any system APIs available. However, it will not resort to running /bin/ping as a subprocess. Pull requests that improve compatibility will accepted so long as they do not start a subprocess.

Build Instructions

This library relies on posix-api, which needs a currently-unreleased version of hsc2hs in order to build. In order to try out this library, try:

~/dev $ git clone https://github.com/haskell/hsc2hs
~/dev $ cd hsc2hs
~/dev/hsc2hs $ cabal install
~/dev/hsc2hs $ cd ..
~/dev $ git clone https://github.com/andrewthad/ping
~/dev $ cd ping
~/dev/ping $ cabal new-build --with-hsc2hs=~/.cabal/bin/hsc2hs

This will build all dependencies, including posix-api, with the upstream hsc2hs tool.

Infelicities

This project's objective is to be cross-platform. However, it does not accomplish this. The author primarily runs a Debian Linux distribution and consequently lacks the resources and the motivation to make this work on other platforms. Contributions to improve compatibility are welcomed. Current known problems include:

• On Linux, the library should fallback to using raw sockets if IPPROTO_ICMP does not work.
• Support for Windows is missing.
• Support for BSD is missing. However, adding raw socket support to improve the situation on Linux may fix this as well.
• Support for Darwin is missing. This should not be difficult since Darwin supports IPPROTO_ICMP sockets.