Hey everyone! I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to network management and I'm trying to set up heartbeat monitoring on my router. I need to decide whether to use wget or curl to check an uptime URL every minute through crontab. Since my router doesn't have a static IP, I can't rely on pinging it.
Here's what I'm considering:
1. **Using wget**:
* * * * * wget -qO /dev/null --timeout=10 https://uptime.betterstack.com/api/v1/example1
2. **Using curl**:
* * * * * curl --retry 3 --retry-delay 2 --max-time 10 -fs --head https://sm.hetrixtools.net/hb/?s=example2 >/dev/null 2>&1 ; echo $?
My main goal is to keep the impact on the router as low as possible. I really don't want to download anything heavy or risk hanging the router with these commands. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to achieve this? I heard from a friend (ChatGPT) that curl might be the better option. Thanks a ton!
2 Answers
You'll want to consider where you're sending the monitoring results, too. If you just want to know if the router is working without pulling results back, then those commands should work as is. Using curl’s -fs option is smart for keeping things quiet and light. But if you want to ensure you're alerted when the router goes down, make sure your monitoring setup can handle that since you’re using VPNs with failover. Might need to explore some more advanced options!
Exactly! That’s the goal. Just making sure whatever method I choose doesn’t add extra load on the router.
It really depends on what you plan to monitor! If you're just looking for basic heartbeat checks, a ping is usually the simplest and lightest option. But since your router doesn't have a static IP, that won’t help you. Both wget and curl can work fine, but with curl, you can add flags like `-fs` to avoid unnecessary output, which keeps resource usage minimal. Just make sure you don’t add any unnecessary data processing in your command.
Totally agree! Curl is great for this, especially since you can tweak the options to make it light on resources. Just remember to test how your router handles it since every device can behave differently!
For sure! Just keep it simple. Curl with the right flags should be no problem at all. Good luck!
Thanks for the insight! I mainly want email alerts for downtime, which I thought heartbeat monitoring could help with.