How do I monitor my internet connection?

August 14, 2010 9:59 AM

I'm looking for a simple way to monitor internet connectivity.

For the next couple of weeks, I'd like to keep tabs on when my home internet connection is working and when it fails.

Is there a simple and thorough way of doing this? Right now I'm just noting down whenever it cuts out on a piece of paper, but obviously I can't do that fulltime.

Ideally there exists a script or something that would ping google.com every 20 minutes, and log a success or failure in a txt file. I have no idea how I'd go about making something like that, though.

Any suggestions?

posted by rollick to computers & internet (7 answers total)

http://www.google.com/search?q=script+monitor+internet+connection

http://blog.akinstech.com/script-to-monitor-your-internet-connection

well that was easy
posted by tracert at 10:04 AM on August 14, 2010

Oh I should mention I'm using Windows Vista Home, and I did see this earlier question but it wasn't all that helpful
posted by rollick at 10:04 AM on August 14, 2010

If you find out your own IP address, then you can use one of the free monitoring services from the outside to verify you are connected. I've used Mon.itor.us with success.
posted by swimming naked when the tide goes out at 10:04 AM on August 14, 2010

haha dang guess I didn't dig deep enough. Thanks!
posted by rollick at 10:05 AM on August 14, 2010

If you're on aby sort of unix based or unix-like system, you can throw together a bash script and a cron job that looks a little like this. You can modify that to append to a text file instead of emailing you if you prefer.
posted by jjb at 10:07 AM on August 14, 2010

Use irc. Connect to a room where idling is fine, ensure all is logged and timestamped then just leave the client open. If you set to auto rejoin then you just need to search the logs for the necessary text.
posted by markx2 at 10:16 AM on August 14, 2010

i use pingplotter.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:24 PM on August 14, 2010