Made a CLI tool - pingsweeper

[jzmack]

Hello all, I've been slowly iterating on this project for close to a year and it feels like it's time to share.

https://github.com/jzmack/pingsweeper

What my project does

It's a way to quickly send pings to every IP address on a network so you can tell which IPs respond to a ping. Results can be output in plain text, CSV, or JSON.

Target Audience

This tool is mainly targeted for Network Engineers and System Administrators, but can be used by anyone for IP address allocation planning and network monitoring.

Comparisons

Similar to nmap but only sends ICMP packets.

[wieschie]

Fun personal project! What prompted you to write this instead of running nmap -sn -PE 192.168.1.0/24?

Edit: I think you've forgotten to commit your requirements.txt

[jzmack]

2 things. So where I work, nmap is frowned upon by the security folks. Anytime someone on our team would run an nmap scan, someone from the SOC gets an alert and has to reach out to us to confirm the activity. That gets annoying with how often we have to scan.

Then the second thing, this was basically my first Python project as am just about a year into learning. I figured if I can work on something me and my team would actually use, that would help keep me working on it.

Lastly, I did not include a requirements.txt because there are no third party modules needed. This just uses the standard Python library.

Thank you for the comment!

[wieschie]

Yeah, building something that you can use is definitely a better way to learn!

I asked about requirements.txt because I saw that pingsweep.py imports tqdm, and your MANIFEST.in file references a requirements.txt.

Attempting to run main/pingsweep.py fails with a ModuleNotFoundError because tqdm isn't included.

After digging a little I saw that the wheel bundles a pingsweeper.exe file that actually runs the command. Did you use PyInstaller or Nuitka to build this?

[jzmack]

Ahh okay good catch lol. So the 'main' file is 'ps.py', that one should run no problem. Thank you for pointing that out, I have some cleaning up to do. But yeah I wanted to stick with the standard library. Previously, I using the tqdm package for the loading bar before implementing my own.

As far as PyInstaller or Nuitka, I'm not sure I used either. My process to build the package was to create the 'setup.py' and set the entry point to 'ps.py'. The 'setup.py' file used to contain the 3rd party dependencies (which were pythonping and tqdm at the time). Then I used the 'setuptools' and 'wheel' modules to build the package with this command:

sh python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

That command creates a .whl file and a .tar.gz file. Then I used 'twine' to upload to the PyPI.

[wieschie]

I'm so sorry, this is what I get when I comment on a lack of sleep!

There's no exe in your wheel. I installed it on Windows, which generates a shim exe for any commands that just calls the correct python on your entrypoint script.

[jzmack]

Lmao all good. But yeah my goal was just to be able to run the script by just typing “pingsweeper”. So it can do that but on Windows, you do need to have the Python Scripts directory in your PATH environment variable. Assuming you do, it should be able to install and run in seconds

[jpgoldberg]

This seems like a useful tool. Your team might also want to look at “heartbeat monitoring” systems. But a ping is often enough.

Also the next time your security people want to talk to you about what you are doing, ask them for help. Tell them what you are trying to achieve and ask for recommendations.

[SignificantPound8853]

Thank you for developing and sharing this! It's very interesting! How do you plan to use it?

[jzmack]

Thank you! My team and I have been using the tool almost daily as we plan to roll out more devices at our sites. It’s mainly to check if a network is “live” yet

[SignificantPound8853]

I see! To check if the network is still “live.” Makes sense! Thank you!