Pingz - Super simple network connection internet availability monitor plasmoid thing

I am on a train right now that provides free wi-fi. But you know how these networks work - one second you're chatting with your friend, next second you lose connection. Getting mad enough about not knowing if I have internet or not, I wrote a super simple Plasma applet to monitor the network connection. This is a bit different from the network manager icon, which shows you that you are connected to the wi-fi, but that does not mean the wi-fi router has access to the internet. So this monitors the internet availability directly by sending ping packets to kde.org google.com, one every 5 seconds. If the ping gets back, it shows green icon (user-online icon), if not, it turns into gray (user-offline) icon. Simple as that.

The code is at kde:scratch/mklapetek/pingz, feel free to improve it if you feel like, it's good enough for me for now :)

Update: One thing I didn't realized when running in plasmoidviewer is, that QProcess::execute(..) waits for the ping process to finish. This has the effect of completely hanging plasma every 5 seconds when added to panel or desktop. Fix will follow shortly (if I'll have internet).

Update2: Fixed.

Comments

[KRF]

Interesting,

I basically had the same idea a while back when implementing a lag-monitoring application - a screenshot of this is here: http://imagebin.org/index.php?mode=image&id=237944.
I also had in mind to port this to a plasma app, so you could easily stick that onto the desktop. Might do if others find it interesting

Having a two-state view is fine, but imo it is quite interesting to see the actual round trip time of your latest packets as well. (That's what lag-monitor does, plotting ping responsed based on time/rtt).

Code is here, if you are interested: https://github.com/krf/lag-monitor

Greets

[KRF]

Whoops, link was messed up - here's the corrected one: http://imagebin.org/index.php?mode=image&id=237944

[Jonathan Frederickson]

Ahh, love the idea. Unfortunately the university I'm at also blocks pings, so it's not too useful for me at the moment... trains do seem like a pretty good use case though. (Took my first train ride with wi-fi earlier this year, and the experience was just as you describe.)

[Marty]

@KRF - thanks! Will check it out in some spare time :)

[Thomsen Wagner]

thx, using it to observe an unstable vpn-connection.

Greetings watho

[hiTop louis vuitton handbags]

Ahh, love the idea. Unfortunately the university I'm at also blocks pings, so it's not too useful for me at the moment... trains do seem like a pretty good use case though.

[replica rolex]

Pingz - Super simple network connection internet availability monitor plasmoid thing

[lanseo]

Good morning, I wonder what I have to do to use the video through my webcam, as I have created multiple accounts, including with gtalk, messenger and facebook and I can not use it

[Marty]

@lanseo - what are you talking about?