How to ping for reachability of remote host in Ruby

Question

I tried using

Ping.pingecho("10.102.52.42", 30)

for reachability of the remote host. This statement returns null even if I'm able to ping the IP manually. Is there an efficient way to determine the reachability of the remote machine in Ruby?

Answer 1

I use the net-ping gem which you need to install. Then the code is easy:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'net/ping'

def up?(host)
    check = Net::Ping::External.new(host)
    check.ping?
end

chost = '10.0.0.1'
puts up?(chost) # prints "true" if ping replies