Ping websites with pimatic-ping

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Is it possible to ping websites like google.com with pimatic-ping?
(Checking if there is an internet connection for example)
If i set http://www.google.com as host in the config it always says not present

It should work. What is your config?

This should work:

{
  "id": "google",
  "name": "Google",
  "class": "PingPresence",
  "host": "http://www.google.com",
  "interval": 60000
}

{
      "id": "fabi_online",
      "name": "Internet",
      "class": "PingPresence",
      "host": "http://www.google.de",
      "timeout": 10000,
      "retries": 4,
      "interval": 300000
    },

Isn’t your router blocking the ping?

@frosenheimer As far as I know, pimatic-ping only supports pinging via ICMP echo requests and it does not support DNS address resolution. So, you can only ping an IP address.

If you are familiar with writing shell scripts you can easily create a HTTP-Ping device using the pimatic-shell-execute plugin.

@mwittig thanks for this answer. Sadly I`m not really into shell scripts, so I will have to delay this function until someone has a solution.

@frosenheimer I have drafted plugin which allows for HTTP/HTTPS service probes. Check out https://www.npmjs.com/package/pimatic-probe

HttpProbe is a Presence Sensor. Thus, you can use the “<deviceId>.presence” variable as part of your rules and you can use the presence status display if you add the device to pimatic page.

Please let me know if this works for you.

@mwittig thank you very much. It works perfectly

@frosenheimer You’re welcome.

Actually, I fixed a bug which caused the plugin to open multiple HTTP connections. This could lead to a blocking situation over time. Please make sure to update the plugin.

I have also added a nice gimmick, which allows for optionally monitoring the response times over time. See package README for details

I think a extra plugin is the wrong way. Why you don’t implement your solution into the ping plugin? I think this is a smarter solution.

@Icesory I am happy to merge my stuff to pimatic-ping at some point if this is feasible and agreed somehow. I just wanted to get something done quickly. Please also note I am planning to extend pimatic-probe with different types of service probes for TCP & UDP based protocols.

While I generally agree with you that ping and probe should be merged at some point, I think, having many plugins for pimatic is not a bad thing at all! To give users a better overview and guidance my suggestion is to provide a topic-based list of plugins. Take a look at ioBroker for example, https://github.com/ioBroker/ioBroker.

There are some ways to get information about available pimatic plugins.

1. Pimatic Menu -> Plugins -> Install
2. http://www.pimatic.org/pages/plugins/
3. https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=pimatic
4. Search for Pimatic on Github

But i agree with you to maybe have a nice overview for the plugins in the future.
Since these are growing rapidly, we should imho think about some meaningful categorization…