README

Alarm Pinger v. 0.6.1
(c) 2002 Jacek Konieczny <jajcus@jajcus.net>
============================================

Alarm Pinger (apinger) is a little tool which monitors various IP devices by
simple ICMP echo requests. There are various other tools, that can do this,
but most of them are shell or perl scripts, spawning many processes, thus much
CPU-expensive, especially when one wants continuous monitoring and fast
response on target failure.  Alarm Pinger is a single program written in C, so
it doesn't need much CPU power even when monitoring many targets with frequent
probes.  Alarm Pinger supports both IPv4 and IPv6. The code have been tested
on Linux and FreeBSD.

Alarm Pinger is quite configurable via $sysconfdir/apinger.conf file. The
configuration file contains definitions for alarms, targets and various
parameters. See the apinger.conf in the src/ directory for description.

apinger needs root privileges to start (to create raw sockets), but will drop
them before sending or receiving any packets. 

Copying and Warranty
--------------------
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free
Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple
Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307 USA

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