PINGER

NOTE: COMMIT HISTORY is only one, as it was in sync with the old repository. To see the full commit history, please refer tho this GitHub repository: https://github.com/NetworkInCode/custom-ping-utility-Vishy70

pinger is a custom ping(8) clone, to send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to network hosts on the internet, built in Golang!

Instructions

Currently, ther is no readily available versioned binary for pinger, so you need to compile from source. It currently only supoorts Linux and MacOS.

Prerequisites

You need to have the Go toolchain set up on your machine. The download and install page on Go's documentation is a good place to start. A summary of it follows.

Linux

• On the website, click the download button and choose the Linux .tar.gz archive file.

• Open a shell/terminal and navigate to locations where the archive downloaded (by default, it would be in Dowloads so run cd ~/Downloads).

• Run the following (you may need to run as root, or use sudo):

  rm -rf /usr/local/go && tar -C /usr/local -xzf go<version-number-here>.linux-amd64.tar.gz

• Add the user/local/go/bin directory to your $PATH shell environment variable. To do this globally, you need to modfiy your $HOME/.profile. You can do this by opening the file (nano $HOME/.profile), and adding the following line on a new line at the end of the file: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin. Save and exit the file.

• Verify that Go is now installed correctly by running go version. It should show something like:

  go version go1.24.1 linux/amd64

• NOTE: You may need to open a new terminal window, for the changes in the $HOME/.profile to take place.

• You can now build the pinger package!

MacOS

• On the website, click the download button and choose the Apple macOS (either ARM64 x86_64 depending on CPU architecture) .pkg file. To check this, you can open a terminal and type the uname -p command to determine it.

• Double click and open the package you installed, and follow the wizard instructions. The installer should install the package in /usr/local/go, and put /usr/local/go/bin in your PATH environment variable.

• You can now build the pinger package!

Dependencies

The exact dependencies for the project can be found in the go.mod file in the pinger directory. The dependencies will get installed when running go build, as below.

Build and Install Pinger

To get build and install the binary, do the following :-

• Clone the repository in a directory, and enter the project directory:

  git clone https://github.com/NetworkInCode/custom-ping-utility-Vishy70 && cd custom-ping-utility-Vishy70

• Change into the pinger directory:

  cd pinger

• Build the application (you can change the destination by modifying the path given to flag -o):

  go build -o ../bin/pinger

• You can now run the application (NOTE: You will likely need root access, or need to run the application suing sudo):

  ../bin/pinger --help

• You can also install it as a binary that can be run as pinger -h by running go install inside of pinger directory, although not suggested. Note: You may likely get permission error, it is likely that your $GOBIN is pointing to /bin, which is not writable by non-root. You will need to setup your $GOBIN and $PATH root environment variables to /bin and $PATH:/usr/local/go/bin. Then, as root, you can directly use pinger command itself. Thus, it is advised to use go build instead, as you can easily run that with sudo.

Usage

pinger sends ICMP Echo Requests. There is only one required argument: a destination address. This can be an IPv4 address, IPv6 address, or even a internet host-name (it will automatically get resolved via DNS), as long as the address is not malformed. ./pinger nitk.ac.in

In addition, there are some flags that can modify pinger's functionality:-

• Use [-4|-6] to specifically use an IPv4/IPv6 address. These are mutually exclusive flags.
• Use [-I] to specify the network device you want to send and receive ICMP Echo Requests and Replies from.
• Use [-c] to specify the number of Echo Requests you want to send
• Use [-t ] to set the packet Time To Live

An example: ./pinger -I wlp45s0 -c 4 -6 nitk.ac.in

Scripts

There is a script to run an example usage of pinger in scripts/test.sh. This script was made with Linux in mind, some minor modifcations may be required for MacOS.

IMPORTANT: the script expects an absolute path to the packages pinger directory. Please keep this in mind!

Features

• Mostly compatible with both Linux and macOS systems.
• Error handling to deal with network timeouts, unreachable hosts, etc.
• IPv4/IPv6 support included
• Custom flags for network interface, number of echo requests, ttl.

Issues

• Unable to handle IPv6's neighbor advertisement & solicitation, and router advertisement & solicitation. Does not count these errors...
• Exact ttl value in packet won't be set (similar to ping(8)), but will still account for TTL Exceeded, and Hop Limit Reached successfully.
• Since requires root privileges, the user currently needs to do some extra configuration of GO Environment variables (for root user) to run the binary simply as pinger.