MultiPing v0.2 (beta)

multiping.sourceforge.net

Overview

MultiPing provides a multi-host, multi-protocol status monitoring tool.  Currently, the supported protocols are ICMP Echo, HTTP, SMTP, and POP.  This goes beyond simply using ICMP Echo to determine the status of a server to actually testing the protocols the server is expected to be providing.

 

Note that MultiPing requires Java 1.5.x (which can be obtained from java.sun.com) as it uses one of the new features provided in this version to perform the ICMP Echo test.  Unfortunately, there is a known bug (5061568) which causes use of this feature to leak sockets on Windows platforms.  This has been fixed, according to the Sun bug database, but the fix hasn’t yet made it into a released build of Java 1.5.x.  It is expected that this will be resolved when 1.5.x is released.  So, if you run MultiPing for an extended period of time all hosts will eventually status as down and other networking capabilities could be negatively impacted on your machine until you close and re-start MultiPing.

 

Despite this, MultiPing is being released as an initial rough-cut beta as the issue is with the underlying Java native code not with MultiPing itself.

 

MultiPing is provided as a runnable .jar file.  You should be able to simply double-click the multiping.jar file to launch MultiPing.  You can then right-click in the main window to access the context menu which will allow you to add, edit, and delete hosts from the list.

 

Each host can have one or more of the supported protocols enabled.  For each enabled protocol zero or more arguments can be provided which are used to status the specified protocol.

 

A file will be created in the same directory as multiping.jar named multiping.dat.  This stores the list of hosts, along with the protocols enabled for each host and the arguments to each enabled protocol.

History


v0.2, 2004-07-03

* added a bootstrap class which gets compiled to target Java 1.1.  the result is that if you attempt to run MultiPing on a system which has an older version of Java, instead of just exiting with an exception, it’ll pop up a dialog telling the user that Java 1.5.0 or later is required.


v0.1, 2004-06-28

* initial rough-cut beta release

Links

bytebucket.blogspot.com

www.sourceforge.net

java.sun.com