parallel options for fping

[Edward Peschko]

All,

First of all, thanks for the tool.. I've found many uses for fping, and was hoping that I could use it for several other applications. So I was wondering:

    1. I have the need to send a tcp packet in places that don't have ICMP enabled - eg. is there way for fping to send a tcp packet to a known port (like port 80)? I know that there is hping, but afaict it doesn't have a 'bulk' switch to send it in many places at once.

    2. Is there a parallelism switch for bulk usage? I'd like to experiment with how many hosts are being pinged in parallel to optimize for time.

    3. what is the fastest way to run fping given a large number of hosts? I've played around with the switches, etc, and the fastest I can get is about a minute to ping 600 hosts (some available some not), and have a feeling that I could make it a lot faster.

Thanks much for any info. Again, I have the need to ping potentially thousands of hosts in a very quick, resource-unobtrusive way in multiple environments which may or may not have ICMP enabled - and fping looked like it would be a good fit for this.

Ed