Any simple alternatives to smoke ping? - eviltoast

My Internet goes down fairly often so I want to start keeping track of it.

  • 7Sea_Sailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    If you want it REALLY easy, you should be able to write a simple bash script that, when called, pings an arbitrary always online website like google, and if the ping returns an error, sends a telegram message to your phone. you could also store the current state in a separate file to allow for “is now down” and “is up again” differentiation, then use the telegram message timestamps to “track” (loosely used term) up- and downtime. To call the script, add it to your crontab and specify your test interval there.

    Getting bash to send to telegram is ridiculously easy, as seen here: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-create-a-simple-bash-shell-script-to-send-messages-on-telegram-lcz31bx. This is EXTREMELY barebones, but it’ll get the job done if you need zero bells and whistles.

    • Romanmir@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      Does telegram allow for local lan only messaging? If not, how does the bash script send the message to telegram?

      I’ve landed on running uptime-kuma on my network, and when I get the “service restored” messages I know that I had an outage last night.

      • 7Sea_Sailor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        no, telegram is cloud based. you send the message via a CURL POST to the telegram API, which contains your bot token and message. details are in the linked guide.

        Kuma obviously is more established and feature-proof, and will work great for most people who want notifications like this. I just wanted to take the prompt for a “simple alternative” overly serious 😎

        • Geronimo Wenja@agora.nop.chat
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          1 year ago

          But their internet is down, so it’ll fail to send to telegram. Realistically it needs to be an external system that is tracking when it receives pings from the home network, so it can show periods where the bash script didn’t ping for a while.