[HN Gopher] Nping - ping, but with a graph or table view
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       Nping - ping, but with a graph or table view
        
       Author : markhan-nping
       Score  : 121 points
       Date   : 2025-02-12 10:43 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | arrty88 wrote:
       | Very cool. I'll be using this going forward
        
         | markhan-nping wrote:
         | thanks ~
        
       | zaptheimpaler wrote:
       | absolute cinema!
        
         | thenthenthen wrote:
         | Niu Bi !
        
       | juliangmp wrote:
       | This looks great, definitely gonna check it out
        
       | zengargoyle wrote:
       | Reminds me of the old SmokePing.
        
       | 1f60c wrote:
       | I wonder why www.google.com resolved to 31.13.94.37, which IPinfo
       | tells me belongs to AS32934 Facebook, Inc.
       | 
       | https://ipinfo.io/31.13.94.37
        
         | markhan-nping wrote:
         | Hello, I'm the developer of Nping, I'm glad you're interested
         | in Nping, forgive me for using translation software to write
         | this content, usually a domain name itself will be resolved to
         | more than one ip address, Nping uses the output of the system
         | command Ping
        
           | zakki wrote:
           | A Domain name resolved to many IP addresses is true. But
           | Google's domain name resolved to Facebook's IP? That is very
           | odd.
        
             | aboardRat4 wrote:
             | That's normal for most websites blocked in China.
             | 
             | They usually resolve to either other blocked websites to
             | trigger a "dangerous website phishing" warning from the
             | browser, or the ISP's own website pretending to be a
             | captive portal.
        
             | markhan-nping wrote:
             | When I switch to vpn I get the right results, maybe GFW is
             | causing the problem
        
           | 1f60c wrote:
           | Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. My comment wasn't meant as criticism
           | of you or Nping; I had just never seen a DNS server
           | intentionally return obviously incorrect results before.
        
         | raphman wrote:
         | Also, the 'apple.com' IP address in the screenshot
         | (221.194.154.187) belongs to a Chinese company.
         | 
         | The developer seems to be located in China. You are seeing the
         | Great Firewall in action:
         | 
         | > The GFW does not have a unique technique of censorship. One
         | of its strengths is to combine several techniques. One of them
         | is the generation, by the network itself (and not by a lying
         | resolver), of bogus DNS responses. You ask for a censored name
         | and as a result you get an answer giving an IP address that has
         | nothing to do with the question asked. [...] But if you ask him
         | about a censored name, then the network generates a false
         | answer. Even if the input is the same, the response varies from
         | a request to another: [...]. The IP address 157.240.17.14
         | belongs to Facebook (normally scratch.mit.edu is at Fastly), a
         | prime example of the lies generated by the GFW.
         | 
         | https://ipregistry.co/blog/chinese-national-firewall
        
           | rfoo wrote:
           | > You are seeing the Great Firewall in action
           | 
           | Why? It's just that Apple has CDNs in China. Yes, as long as
           | you do all the bureaucracy nonsense and comply to censorship
           | you can do that.
           | 
           | e6858.e19.s.tl88.net resolves to 221.194.154.187. tl88.net is
           | the domain for a CDN vendor mainly operating in China.
           | 
           | And it does serve www.apple.com content with actual
           | www.apple.com TLS cert.
        
             | raphman wrote:
             | Thanks for the explanation about the CDN for apple.com.
             | However, the parent's observation seems to be consistent
             | with the Great Firewall, no?
        
               | rfoo wrote:
               | Oops, sorry, yes you are right. For some reason I didn't
               | see GP's comment at all and ignored the fact that you
               | were replying to it /facepalm
        
       | cooloo wrote:
       | What's the difference from gping?
        
         | markhan-nping wrote:
         | Partitioned and tabular views are supported, gping is slightly
         | less noticeable when there are a lot of domains, and of course
         | Nping has a lot of iterative optimization to do.
        
       | ValtteriL wrote:
       | There is also nping that comes with nmap
        
       | nemoniac wrote:
       | There already exists a tool called nping. It comes with nmap.
       | 
       | https://nmap.org/nping/
        
         | markhan-nping wrote:
         | thanks ~ I named it because of the pun in Chinese at the time,
         | so maybe in the future I'll consider using a binary like pping.
        
           | HL33tibCe7 wrote:
           | pping already exists too. It's a bit of a crowded market...
        
             | teddyh wrote:
             | There's:
             | 
             | * 2ping <https://www.finnie.org/software/2ping/>
             | 
             | * fping <https://www.fping.org/>
             | 
             | * hping <http://www.hping.org/>
             | 
             | * nping <https://nmap.org/>
             | 
             | * oping <https://noping.cc/documentation/oping/>
             | 
             | There's also qping, tping and rping, but they are not
             | implementing ping functionality, but are tools for checking
             | the status of specific remote services.
        
               | toomuchtodo wrote:
               | Is there an awesome-{}-tools list of these somewhere by
               | chance?
        
               | teddyh wrote:
               | I just used                 apt-file search --regexp
               | 'bin/.ping'
               | 
               | If I extend it to                 apt-file search
               | --regexp 'bin/[^/]*ping$'
               | 
               | I also find:
               | 
               | * smokeping <https://smokeping.org/>
        
               | VectorLock wrote:
               | smokeping is one of the best of these bunch, if not
               | significantly more effort to setup.
        
               | _blk wrote:
               | Nice overview. I see there's space for some more
               | networking tools since there's plenty of letters to go.
               | Is there a hash table to pick the next letter?
        
           | dcminter wrote:
           | How about "pingui"? :)
        
       | withinboredom wrote:
       | It'd be nice to provide install instructions for non-mac users as
       | well.
        
         | markhan-nping wrote:
         | thanks ~. I have compiled corresponding binaries for common
         | operating system versions, which may not cover all operating
         | systems.
        
       | aboardRat4 wrote:
       | npingRuan Jian Yi Jing Cun Zai ,Jiu Shi Gen nmapYi Qi Zou De Ruan
       | Jian .  Jian Yi Zhong Xin Ming Ming Yi Xia .
        
       | Shorel wrote:
       | Rename it to table ping.
        
         | markhan-nping wrote:
         | thanks ~ I named it because of the pun in Chinese at the time,
         | so maybe in the future I'll consider using a binary like pping.
        
         | ramon156 wrote:
         | tping !
        
           | markhan-nping wrote:
           | That's a nice name, but I'll have to sacrifice my Chinese
           | pun.
        
       | alpn wrote:
       | Another interesting tool in this space is trippy, which 'combines
       | the functionality of traceroute and ping'
       | 
       | https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy
        
         | amarshall wrote:
         | There's also the somewhat similar mtr
         | https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/
        
           | linsomniac wrote:
           | mtr is my go-to, great tool!
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | The new generation has to rediscover gnuplot and ministat.
        
       | AlisaWang wrote:
       | It's really an interesting idea; I'll try it.
        
       | natdempk wrote:
       | Random question, but how consistent should you expect to get
       | pings to be over consumer internet to something like google?
       | Single-digit ms variance? Few ms? 10's of ms? Always kind of
       | curious for trying to optimize my network setup at home.
        
         | dietsche wrote:
         | you can get it down to nearly zero using OpenWRT and
         | configuring SQM. Use https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
         | to measure and tune until you get an A+ result.
        
           | zamadatix wrote:
           | Before a bunch of people read this and become confused why
           | their jitter didn't go to 0 "nothing you can do with your
           | home network will ever make your jitter less than when you
           | plug just your PC/Laptop directly into the ISP connection,
           | let it get the public address, and only run a ping from it".
           | Also things you do at home, such as use wireless, will often
           | add a ms or two of occasional jitter even when you use a 6
           | GHz channel with extremely low contention and interference.
           | 
           | Bufferbloat is good thing to fix in general though and
           | highlights why one should worry less about "how do single
           | ICMP packets behave" and more about "how does actual loaded
           | traffic of the protocol type I'm using behave in real usage".
           | The results are often staggeringly different.
        
       | linsomniac wrote:
       | Wooo, Windows support! Availability of network diagnostics tools
       | in Windows has been problematic, particularly for very infrequent
       | use. There are some good looking ones for purchase, but it's hard
       | to purchase when we don't usually need it.
       | 
       | For a while, largely related I think to just not having enough
       | bandwidth at our office, but also partly because our coax on the
       | Xfinity cablemodem was sketchy, we were not infrequently having
       | issues, and the majority of my coworkers are on Windows. ping and
       | tracert aren't very good tools for finding out what is going on
       | with intermitant networking issues, especially when it might also
       | be people's home wifi from WFH. There were times I just wished
       | they could run mtr.
       | 
       | Over the last year or so I've been seeing more Windows tools
       | available, which has been great!
        
         | VectorLock wrote:
         | WinMTR is a thing, but you have to install it, ofcourse.
        
           | linsomniac wrote:
           | Thanks, WinMTR seems like exactly the sort of thing I was
           | looking for back then, not sure why it didn't come up in our
           | searches at the time.
        
       | panosv wrote:
       | Great work! There are quite a few flavors of ping:
       | 
       | TCPPing: https://netbeez.net/blog/tcping/
       | 
       | vmPing: <https://netbeez.net/blog/how-to-use-vmping/>
       | 
       | DNSPing: <https://netbeez.net/blog/dnsping-linux/>
       | 
       | PathPing: <https://netbeez.net/blog/path-analysis-pathping-
       | windows/>
       | 
       | fping: <https://netbeez.net/blog/linux-how-to-use-fping/>
       | 
       | gping: <https://netbeez.net/blog/linux-how-to-use-gping/>
       | 
       | prettyping: <https://netbeez.net/blog/linux-how-to-use-
       | prettyping/>
       | 
       | nping: <https://netbeez.net/blog/how-to-use-nping/>
        
         | walrus01 wrote:
         | fping is most commonly seen as the backend tool under the
         | classic (24 years old now, and still maintained) smokeping
         | 
         | https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&q=smokeping...
        
           | DrPhish wrote:
           | Smokeping is an amazing and underrated resource as a network
           | health metric and diagnostics tool.
           | 
           | If you have a network monitoring or asset system you can
           | export IP addresses from, you should use a small glue script
           | to automatically build a smokeping configuration. I've got
           | one for our LAN and one for the WAN at each of our sites so I
           | can track down issues at either level.
           | 
           | The LAN connection charts are a great daily sanity check, and
           | the WAN connections (I have every-to-every for each site so
           | any and all inter-site issues can be seen) can help keep your
           | ISP honest with the service they're delivering.
        
       | wolrah wrote:
       | Neat, reminds me a lot of noping which is a long-time favorite of
       | mine (and its non-graphical counterpart oping):
       | https://noping.cc/
       | 
       | One thing I've always wanted in a ping tool but never found is
       | something that can log anomalous results, so for example one
       | could leave it running in a screen/tmux session and come back a
       | day or two later to not just see that there had been some
       | instances of high latency or packet loss but also see when it
       | happened and for now long per burst.
       | 
       | With all the existing tools I'm aware of I can come back to a
       | long-running ping after a day or two and see that there were 170
       | pings that got lost but have no idea if that was individual
       | intermittent drops or one continuous event like a cable modem
       | rebooting in the middle of the night.
       | 
       | A couple of times I've attempted to do it myself but the nature
       | of ICMP means it ends up requiring lower level programming than
       | I'm comfortable with.
        
       | goodpoint wrote:
       | Should have used GPL...
        
       | vzaliva wrote:
       | I could not find how to install it on Linux.
        
       | arjie wrote:
       | What I like doing is using ttyplot and then it supports many
       | commands and you can even specify an extraction param to plot on
       | so then it's very Unix philosophy.
       | 
       | https://github.com/tenox7/ttyplot
        
         | walth wrote:
         | Also love gnuplot, and and ministat for stats/graphs from the
         | command line
        
       | pimlottc wrote:
       | > Nping mean NB Ping
       | 
       | What does NB Ping mean?
        
       | MrLeap wrote:
       | This has made me wonder if there's a tracert that attempts to
       | geolocate the hops and put them on a map. That would be an
       | interesting tool.
        
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       (page generated 2025-02-15 23:01 UTC)