An Overview of Free Network Scanning Tools - Fping
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Unlike the other port scanning software tools, Fping is solely a command console tool. Fping also differs from the others in that it uses the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) protocol. It tries to make a TCP connection to a particular port in order to find out if the host is alive. You can use the command line to ping any particular number of hosts or identify a file that consists of hosts.
Fping is designed to be integrated in scripts. The port scanning tool operates much like the ping program that’s found in Microsoft Windows. But Fping has additional features. For one, you can adjust the time between pings from 1 millisecond to 5 seconds. If you want to test your network’s status in the background, you can have Fping to beep every time the ping is successful or when the host does not reply. You can use one command to ping multiple hosts. You can open up a file and read a hostlist.
If you ping a host that times out or doesn’t respond right away, Fping will send out a ping packet. Then it goes on to the next host. If the host responds, Fping makes a note of it and then deletes it from the list of hosts it checks. However, if the host does not respond within a time frame, then Fping will note it as unreachable.
Fping is a flexible tool in that it runs on POSIX-oriented operating systems, including AIX, Mac OS X, UP-UX, OpenVMS, OpenSolaris, LynxOS, and others. POSIX, which stands for Portable Operating System Interface, is an open operating interface standard that’s accepted worldwide. IEEE produced this standard. Both ANSI and ISO recognize it. The whole idea behind this standard was to define the APIs (application programming interfaces), utilities and shell interfaces for software that supports alternative versions of the Unix operating system. However, this standard can apply to any operating system.
If you want to get an overview of Fping, check outKwakkelflap’s website. It has some good screen shots of the tool, and you can also download it here. Kwakkelflap also gives you the option to download the user application document so you can begin to learn Fping.
Fping is a small port scanning utility tool. So you don’t have to worry about it consuming a lot of space on your hard drive, which is a plus for any type of application.
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