I'm writing a wake on lan script for a set of our lab computers. We have sqlite db with a list of the computer hostnames, IPs, and MACs and currently I ping each of them with '-c1' so it doesn't run endlessly – but even that takes some waiting, is there a quicker way to get answer rather than ping? Using ping seems to slow the script quite a bit as it needs the ping answers to continue.
Thanks much for any suggestions!
Best Answer
Sending a single packet and waiting for a response is going to be one of the fastest possible ways, and ping is a fine way to do that. In fact, depending on your use case, I'd argue that it's too fast, since it doesn't really tell you if the system is actually doing anything useful, just that the kernel's network subsystem is alive and configured.
But assuming that's good enough, you can make some improvements. First, you could use
-W1to decrease the ping timeout to one second. Second, you could make your script ping the different hosts asynchronously (in a background thread), and check the results as needed rather than waiting.Alternately, you can re-think the approach and have the remote systems check in somehow when they're up, and if a system hasn't checked in, you can assume it's down.