Edit report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52071&edit=1
ID: 52071
User updated by: php at richardneill dot org
Reported by: php at richardneill dot org
Summary: RFE: ping
Status: Wont fix
Type: Feature/Change Request
Package: Network related
Operating System: Linux
PHP Version: Irrelevant
New Comment:
Agreed: php would have to internally exec('ping'). That's not especially
pretty, but it's no uglier than having to explicitly do it. The
advantage is that the code (and all error cases) have to be handled only
once within PHP, rather than by ten thousand different end-users :-)
Previous Comments:
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[2010-06-13 03:15:15] [email protected]
But the reason the exec() works is because you are starting a new
setuid-root
process to do it. There is no way to do it from a non-root process,
which means
you can't eliminate the exec(), which means a PHP implementation would
internally
have to do exec('ping') which makes no sense.
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[2010-06-13 03:13:07] php at richardneill dot org
I do see your point. On the other hand, I can (as a normal user) quite
easily use ping by relying on that Setuid binary, via exec(). Wouldn't
this approach work?
(the key win here is to eliminate needing exec(), which tends to upset
nervous managers during code-review)
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[2010-06-13 02:38:27] [email protected]
This is not going to work in most PHP environments because doing
raw-socket ICMP
requests, like ping does requires root access. You will notice that
your ping
binary is setuid-root on your machine, so unless you are running PHP as
root,
doing it from within PHP simply won't work.
If you do have root access, it isn't that hard to do with a
socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, getprotobyname('icmp')) call, but
since it
wouldn't work for most people, I don't see the point in adding it to
PHP.
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[2010-06-13 02:28:38] php at richardneill dot org
Description:
------------
Surprisingly, PHP is missing the ability to ping another host (and check
it's
alive). So I'd like to make a request to add it. I'd suggest using
something
like fping rather than standard ping, as this is more script-friendly -
for
example, fping can be made to return immediately as soon as it discovers
that
a given host is alive. For example:
fping -q -B1 www.php.net
I know that there is Net_Ping available via PEAR, but often PEAR
extensions
aren't available on many hosting environments; likewise it's awkward to
package a PHP web-application when the PEAR extension isn't already
packaged
for the distro. Is ping suficiently fundamental to be considered core?
Test script:
---------------
This command should either exist in 2 forms, or have several options.
Typical use cases are:
1. Is machine X alive (and responding to Pings)
2. Can I do a DNS lookup + route to that machine
3. What is the packet loss fraction.
This is easy enough to do by using exec(), but it would be nice to have
a native function. Thanks.
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