fping

fping is a program to send ICMP echo probes to network hosts, similar to ping, but much better performing when pinging multiple hosts. fping has a long long story: Roland Schemers did publish a first version of it in 1992 and it has established itself since then as a standard tool.

Current maintainer:
David Schweikert <david@schweikert.ch>

Website:
https://fping.org/

Mailing-list:
https://groups.google.com/group/fping-users

Installation

If you want to install fping from source, proceed as follows:

0. Run ./autogen.sh (only if you got the source from Github).
1. Run ./configure with the correct arguments. (see: ./configure --help)
2. Run make; make install.
3. Make fping either setuid, or, if under Linux: sudo setcap cap_net_raw+ep fping

If you can't run fping as root or can't use the cap_net_raw capability, you can also run fping in unprivileged mode. This works on MacOS and also on Linux, provided that your GID is included in the range defined in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ping_group_range. This is particularly useful for running fping in rootless / unprivileged containers.

Usage

Have a look at the fping(8) manual page for usage help. (fping -h will also give a minimal help output.)

Credits

• Original author: Roland Schemers (schemers@stanford.edu)
• Previous maintainer: RL "Bob" Morgan (morgan@stanford.edu)
• Initial IPv6 Support: Jeroen Massar (jeroen@unfix.org / jeroen@ipng.nl)
• Other contributors: see CHANGELOG.md