A poor man's replacement for Ruby's Ping.pingecho method

poor_mans_ping_test.rb

# Ping.pingecho uses TCP echo requests, which sucks when you really want
# to know if the machine is pingable, ie - it answers ICMP requests

# Here's a poor man's replacement for use in a pinch:

def pingable?(host, timeout=5)
  system "ping -c 1 -t #{timeout} #{host} >/dev/null"
end

Hey! I'm speaking from the future. 8 years after you wrote this.

You can still reimplement that old code source https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.8.7/libdoc/ping/rdoc/Ping.html

def ping(host, service='echo')
  Timeout.timeout(5) do
    TCPSocket.new(host, service).close
  end
  true
rescue Errno::ECONNREFUSED
  true
rescue Timeout::Error, StandardError
  false
end

# ping('localhost', 3000)
# ping('google.com', 80)