Well, being the dedicated type that I am, I wrote a script over my Thanksgiving break at my Mom's house. It worked great. It would scan through the hosts file for interesting hosts, query the hosts for active information, and build an MRTG configuration around it. Some of that can be done with existing indexmaker, but I had coded in configurable variables so that it could accommodate ports that were up/down, up/up, or down/down for various amounts of time and keep the data or shred it. Know what I did with it earlier today? I deleted it. Completely accidentally... deleted. I felt ill. There's no "recycle bin" in Unix. There's no "undelete" command.

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ICMP, the Internet's best friend. Testing the paths, passing back blocked path info, or warning of packet size issues, this power-protocol get's two powerful Ninja thumbs up. Ping and traceroute are the so embedded into basic troubleshooting that often-times non-technical staff members at least know to send them along with any requests for troubleshooting. Ping and trace can be used to acquire more in-depth insight than basic reachability info.

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