Nearly 3 years later and I stumbled across http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17031/A-Network-Sniffer-in-C which gave me enough of a hint to help me find a solution to receiving ICMP packets on Windows 7 (don’t know about Vista, which the original question was about but I suspect this solution would work). The two key points are that the socket has … Read more
Although ICMP uses RAW sockets (which require admin rights on Win2K and later), Microsoft circumvents its own security rules to allow its ICMP APIs to get through. As such, don’t use RAW sockets directly to send your own ICMP ping messages. Use IcmpSendEcho() and related functions instead.
Linux have a special ICMP socket type you can use with: socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_ICMP); This allows you to only send ICMP echo requests The kernel will handle it specially (match request/responses, fill in the checksum). This only works if a special sysctl is set. By default not even root can use this kind of socket. … Read more
If you don’t need to support Windows, here’s a really concise way to do it: import os hostname = “google.com” #example response = os.system(“ping -c 1 ” + hostname) #and then check the response… if response == 0: print hostname, ‘is up!’ else: print hostname, ‘is down!’ This works because ping returns a non-zero value … Read more