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Howdy HN!
I find myself testing my ping from time to time, especially when my internet seems wonky while WFH. It feels like there should be an easier way test my ping than puling up a terminal or a complex web app - especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal.
I figured I should be the change I wish to see in the world and created this super light ping test.
I also created a latency monitoring solution (https://github.com/cjjeakle/network-monitor), feel free to clone and try it out! I know there are a lot more mature monitoring solutions out there, but I never did figure out how to set them up. This one is super simple: clone it to some device that's always on, compile it, set up some systemd stuff, and it's ready to rock on port 8180!
I like this one which I think was a Show HN a while ago
https://github.com/apenwarr/blip
My hope is to keep the code super simple and the delay to visible info in the UI very low. Elsewhere in the thread folks mentioned the excellent http://gcping.com/. That site has a ton of destinations to test latency to and reports the median of a number of samples - that is a really cool feature set! I don't think I'll be able to do anything close to that in tens of lines of inline JS, unfortunately.
Still, the measurements start super noisy and I'd like to ensure my site gives useful data even at the start. I did a bit of a hack to hopefully force the RTT to converge to something useful. I now fire off 3 time-delayed measurements after the page loads. By the time the third finishes, the numbers appear to be pretty stable.
On Android, I run servers under Termux, e.g., DNS and HTTPS proxy.
Another use is checking email without using a browser or an app. I use a tiny shell script to check for new mail with openssl. It prints out the messages to the terminal as plain text. Termux has good scrolling so its easy enough to read. This allows me to keep email out of the browser and email messages off the phone, generally.
https://termux.com
https://github.com/termux
Available from F-Droid.
I believe Termux is still quite popular among some HN readers. I noticed someone submitted Termux-GUI plugin just the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33011500
This is super cool! I like the ability to review previous results. Not sure why people are getting so hung up on how ping in the terminal is so much simpler.
Not sure if this is desired, but if at some point alerting was built into this, that would be awesome.
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On a related note, I currently use the following tools to monitor my network:
- bash-uptime[1] -- BASH script I wrote for simple (for me) icmp/http monitoring.
- iPerf3 server so I can test my bandwidth speeds over the LAN or Wireguard
- Nfcapd/nfdump to ingest netflow from my firewall and router and give me the ability to search that netflow with nfdump (I have a multi-arch Docker image for Nfcapd that I maintain[2])
- Syslog-ng to ingest logs and write them to my filesystem with some scripts I use to search the logs quickly via grep
- Gotify for all my network-related notifications
[1] https://github.com/heywoodlh/bash-uptime
[2] https://hub.docker.com/r/heywoodlh/nfcapda