Use ping through SOCKS server?

Question

I'd like to periodicity check if my SOCKS server is working fine. In order to do that, I thought of pinging 8.8.8.8 (google DNS server) through the SOCKS server.

Is there other recommended way? If it's optimal, how can I ping through SOCKS with python?

Answer 1

A SOCKS proxy provides a TCP proxy service (SOCKS 5 added UDP Support). You cannot perform an ICMP Echo "via" a SOCKS proxy service.

Even if you could, you would be testing ICMP Echo and Echo Reply, and not that your SOCKS server is running fine.

If you want to test that your SOCKS server is "running fine" I'd suggest that you open local listening port and then try to connect to it via the SOCKS service.

Answer 2

You can use httping to check the network through the SOCKS server instead of the ordinary ping.

ping: send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts
httping: measure the latency and throughput of a webserver

ICMP works at Layer3(the Network Layer) of the OSI model, SOCKS works at Layer5(the Session Layer), httping works at Layer7(the Application Layer), so ping message cannot pass though the SOCKS, but httping message can.

For example, I setup a shadowsocks(a SOCKS5 proxy) server in a VPS, use my macbook pro as a client using 127.0.0.1:1080, and I want to check if the network to google is good.

httping -x 127.0.0.1:1080 -g http://www.google.com -5

screen capture of httping google through SOCKS5

httping usage httping [options] -5 The proxy server selected is a SOCKS5 server. -g url This selects the url to probe. E.g.: http://localhost/ -x proxyhost[:port] Probe using a proxyserver.