Wireless Client PING-Based monitor system question

[Paulo Colomes]

Hi:

I joined this forums because i need to recopilate info about a monitor system.

So, i have a relative big wireless network and due to legal instances I MUST use a ping-based monitor system to see the status of my network devices and the final clients on wireless station.

We developed a php linux-based system to make pings every 5 minutes to see if there is a host UP or DOWN. Everything works fine, the server is making the pings to the clients and MRTG generates graphic statistics.

Reference image -> http://img103.imageshack.us/img103/9125/pingred0xq.jpg

The problem is now I have received a notification to make a change on this system to send the pings FROM the clients TO the server and generate statistics.

Is there any difference between making pings from the Client side to the server and viceversa? Does round-trip time is different maybe?

What are the technicals issues on this system?

I accept every critic, advice, suggestion, information, etc.

PS: Sorry my poor english

[rduke]

That's interesting. It sounds as if you may have a good reason for implementing this, but it would also seem to be an inefficient monitoring scheme. A polling interval of 5 minutes does not give that much granularity for statistics even if you are able to make it work from the client side. Also, you would need to centrally collect the statistics in some way. If it were me I would stick to a centrally based monitoring system. I make heavy use of the syslog capabiliy on Cisco access points since they log just about everything. You can even have a syslog monitoring system page you for something as small as dropped wireless connection if you want to go that far.

Sorry if that's not much help, but I would definately have some people look at the big picture before implementing the proposed solution.

Good luck with it.

R Duke