PHP > Ping With No Root Access - php

Question

I want to ping a single ip address fast and easy with a little ping script, I dont know if this is possible I have looked at other techniques but those required me to have root access to my server which I dont. So I was wondering if anyone knew how to do this I have seen a couple of people using Nmap but I cant get the hold of that.
If anyone has any ideas please post.

Answer 1

You may want to use the socket functions to create a ICMP ping packet with a pre-calculated checksum. Here's the code I use to ping from PHP:
function pingHost($host, $timeout=1) {
$payload = "\x08\x00\x7d\x4b\x00\x00\x00\x00PingHost";
$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, 1);
socket_set_options(
$socket,
SOL_SOCKET,
SO_RCVTIMEO,
array(
'sec' => $timeout,
'usec' => 0,
)
);
socket_connect($socket, $host, 0);
socket_send($socket, $payload, strlen($payload), 0);
if (socket_read($socket, 255) === false) {
$result = true;
} else {
$result = false;
}
socket_close($socket);
return $result;
}
echo pingHost('myhostname');
Ah, I missed that you need root for this. Then you cannot ICMP ping the host. You can however do other types of pinging that may be just as good. The key is to find out what services the host is running. Is it a web server running HTTP or HTTPS?
Then you can use cURL.
// http://css-tricks.com/snippets/php/check-if-website-is-available/
function isDomainAvailible($domain)
{
//check, if a valid url is provided
if(!filter_var($domain, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL))
{
return false;
}
//initialize curl
$curlInit = curl_init($domain);
curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,10);
curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_HEADER,true);
curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_NOBODY,true);
curl_setopt($curlInit,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
//get answer
$response = curl_exec($curlInit);
curl_close($curlInit);
if ($response) return true;
return false;
}
If curl is not available you should be able to use get_file_contents() with a known valid URL.
Is it a db server, say mysql or mssql? Do something similar but use PDO to open a connection to it and run a command.
If the service is operational, then the host is online. Of course, this checks if the host networking stack is online AND if the service is running. But since you can't ping without root, this might be your best bet.
Lastly, you can always try and see if a exec() or system() call to 'ping' will work, or create a shell script that has root privileges then execute it using PHP.
Those are all the ways I know work.