Zing is a lightweight, zero packet utility similar to ping, that provides similar functionality as the ubiquitous ping network utility. The Zing network utility was published in Linux magazine for December 2022 Issue 265/2022 as "Zing Me" here: https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2022/265/Zing#article_i5
A follow up article about an implementation as a bash shell script was published in Admin Magazine 77/2023 as "Have a Bash with the Zing network utility Zinger" here: https://www.admin-magazine.com/Archive/2023/77/Have-a-Bash-with-the-Zing-network-utility.
The userbook as an ebook "Zing This!" is here: https://books2read.com/u/bOEVPo and is available in this GitHub repository under the directory "books" as ePub and PDF documents.
- No data payload is sent or received, to avoid network congestion.
- Ability to check both for a host and the ports are alive and available.
- Calculate the time to reach a host via connect and disconnect.
- Available to run on multiple platforms in this case Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Work with Internet Protocol version 4 and version 6 addresses.
- Similar parameters and report of data as ping--a familiar look and feel to the utility.
The Zing network utility requires Java 8 or JDK 8 in order to run. You can download a version of the OpenJDK 8 from many sources on the Internet.
I personally use and like the Azul Systems OpenJDK 8 which you can download from: https://www.azul.com/downloads/?version=java-8-lts&package=jdk
After downloading, then double-check the JDK is successfully installed by opening a console or terminal and running:
After successfully compiling the zing network utility, you can run it simply with java as:
- Classfile .class
- Jar file .jar
An alias in Linux/macOS can simplify running the Zing network utility.
- Zing classfile .class alias
- Zing JAR file .jar alias
Here are some example screenshots showing both ping and zing in action on the Internet. The ping network utility fails but zing succeeds.
An example ping failure using ping utility to ping "nist.gov" which fails...
An example zing success using zing utility to zing "nist.gov" which succeeds...
A "side-by-side" comparison of both ping and zing to the same address of nist.gov...
An example of ping to open-DNS server one.one.one.one using TCP/IP v6 to the host...
Zing has been ported as of November 2022 to C# and Python; as of January 2023 Zing has been ported to Go. Zing has been ported to Kotlin, Rust, and Ruby.
If you port Zing to another programming language, please reach out and share!
The Zing utility is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3. The documentation, and man page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/