On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Anna Edwards wrote: > i need a program that pings several servers (decided by a main server) > and records ping times to send to the home server. can someone help me > with it? If you have a web server on the "main server" and can receive email on the home server, you could do something like this in a bash script: wget http://main.server/ping_list.txt for server in $(cat ping_list.txt); do echo $server >> ping_out.txt ; ping -c 5 $server | tail -1 >> ping_out.txt ; done mail pingtimes at home.server < ping_out.txt Possibly better to use scp for file transfers instead of wget and mail, but I don't know the trick to doing scp without interaction for the authentication. There is a way to set up some kind of "keygen" thing -- someone else will have to say. If you do this using scp, you'll have to have a way to take the incoming data file and append it to previous files, or maybe just give it a different name based on the time. Mike