gping and Nextinspace
Charly's Column
Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, Charly has time to devote to gadgets like graphical ping tools, flashing space stations, and space walks.
Every now and then I notice tools that are useful, interesting, or ideally both, but sadly don't offer me enough material for a full-page article. This explains why there are two additions to the toolbox this month: gping [1] and Nextinspace [2].
gping
A ping variant, gping graphically displays the determined round trip times (Figure 1). Admittedly, this is not exactly a new idea, but most tools of this kind require a graphical interface, while gping does its magic on the console, making it my tool of choice when I'm logged into a server via SSH.
![](/var/linux_magazin/storage/images/issues/2021/245/two-types-of-round-trip/figure-1/783422-1-eng-US/Figure-1_large.png)
First I need Cargo, the Rust package manager, because gping is written in Rust (Listing 1, first line). In addition, gping needs a few more components, in particular rustc, but the package manager automatically fetches these as dependencies when you install Cargo.
Listing 1
Install gping
$ sudo apt-get -fym install cargo $ cargo install gping
Once everything is on board, it's time to set up gping (Listing 1, second line). It ends up in the ~/.cargo/bin/
directory. To use gping in a convenient way, either add this directory to $PATH
, or create a symlink to a directory that exists in your $PATH
.
Gping only supports a few parameters. IPv4 or IPv6 can be enforced with -4
and -6
respectively, while -n 10
increases the ping interval from one to 10 seconds.
Nextinspace
I like pointless but interesting gadgets and have more time on my hands than usual right now due to COVID-19. What I wanted to do was build a small model space station (e.g., made of Lego) where an LED flashes whenever the International Space Station passes over my home village. This requires a bit of software. During my research, I stumbled across Nextinspace, which didn't help me with my little project, but is interesting nonetheless. It notifies you of upcoming space-related projects around the world: rocket launches, satellite launches, spacewalks, and more (Figure 2).
![](/var/linux_magazin/storage/images/issues/2021/245/two-types-of-round-trip/figure-2/783425-1-eng-US/Figure-2_large.png)
Nextinspace, written in Python, can be beamed onto your device using the pip Python installer (Listing 2). If you then enter nextinspace
, the next upcoming event is output. The -v
switch brings additional information to light. Two other options help to classify the events: -l
shows only rocket launches, while -e
shows all other operations (but no launches).
Listing 2
Installing Nextinspace
$ apt update $ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip $ pip install nextinspace
Infos
- gping: https://crates.io/crates/gping
- Nextinspace: https://pypi.org/project/nextinspace/
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