== Description
A collection of classes that provide different ways to ping computers.
== Prerequisites
* The win32-open3 (1.8.x) and windows-pr libraries are required on
MS Windows when using the Net::Ping::External class unless you're
using JRuby.
== Installation
gem install net-ping
== Notes
Please read the documentation under the 'doc' directory. Especially pay
attention to the documentation pertaining to ECONNREFUSED and TCP pings.
Also note the documentation regarding down hosts.
You do not need win32-open3 with Ruby 1.9.x. The open3 library that ships
as part of the Ruby standard library should work.
== How to require net-ping
You can do either this:
require 'net/ping'
In which case you will get Net::Ping and all of its subclasses. Or,
you can load individual subclasses like this:
require 'net/ping/tcp'
The former has the advantage of being easier to remember and all inclusive,
not to mention backwards compatible. The latter has the advantage of
reducing your memory footprint.
== Known Issues
Older versions of Ruby 1.9.x may not work with UDP pings.
Older versions of JRuby will return false positives in UDP pings
because of an incorrect error class being raised. See JRuby-4896.
== License
Artistic 2.0
== More documentation
If you installed this library via Rubygems, you can view the inline
documentation via ri or fire up 'gem server', and point your browser at
http://localhost:8808.