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In this Fping – A High Performance Ping Tool for Linux tutorial, We will show you how to install fping and how to use fping. fping is a program like ping that uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is responding.
Table of Contents
What is Fping
Fping is a High-Performance Ping Tool for Linux. fping is a program like ping which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is responding. fping differs from ping in that you can specify any number of targets on the command line, or specify a file containing the lists of targets to ping. Instead of sending to one target until it times out or replies, fping will send out a ping packet
and move on to the next target in a round-robin fashion. In the default mode, if a target replies, it is noted and removed from the list of targets to check; if a target does not respond within a
certain time limit and/or retry limit it is designated as unreachable. fping also supports sending a specified number of pings to a target, or looping indefinitely (as in ping ). Unlike ping, fping
is meant to be used in scripts, so its output is designed to be easy to parse.
The binary named fping6 is the same as fping, except that it uses IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4.
I have written multiple Linux Tutorial, Please go through it.
How to Install Fping in Linux Systems
You can use the below command to install fping and use as per your OS Family, Example if you are using CentOS or Redhat then use $ sudo yum install fping command to install fping utility
# sudo apt install fping [On Debian/Ubuntu]
# sudo yum install fping [On CentOS/RHEL]
# sudo dnf install fping [On Fedora 22+]
# sudo pacman -S fping [On Arch Linux]
Fping Options
-a Show systems that are alive.
-A Display targets by address rather than DNS name.
-b n Number of bytes of ping data to send. The minimum size (normally 12) allows room for the data that fping needs to do its work (sequence number, timestamp). The reported received data size
includes the IP header (normally 20 bytes) and ICMP header (8 bytes), so the minimum total size is 40 bytes. Default is 56, as in ping. Maximum is the theoretical maximum IP datagram size
(64K), though most systems limit this to a smaller, system-dependent number.
-B n Backoff factor. In the default mode, fping sends several requests to a target before giving up, waiting longer for a reply on each successive request. This parameter is the value by which the
wait time (-t) is multiplied on each successive request; it must be entered as a floating-point number (x.y). The default is 1.5.
Fping – A High Performance Ping Tool for Linux
How to use Fping
$ fping -u -g 192.21.93.247/22
-u Show targets that are unreachable.
-g addr/mask
Generate a target list from a supplied IP netmask, or a starting and ending IP. Specify the netmask or start/end in the targets portion of the command line. If a network with netmask is given,
the network and broadcast addresses will be excluded. ex. To ping the network 192.168.1.0/24, the specified command line could look like either:
Fping Multiple IP Address
You can use the below command will fping multiple IP addresses at once and it will display the status as alive or unreachable. We hope this post “Fping – A High Performance Ping Tool for Linux” has gave you basic idea of how to use fping tools.
$ fping 192.21.93.249 192.21.93.251 192.21.93.205
This will show which IP is alive or unreachable.
Conclusion:
We hope this tutorial “Fping – A High Performance Ping Tool for Linux” helps you to find the unused IP addresses from subnets that you can use.
Official Website Fping