How do I know whether ping.module is working?

By reikiman on 26 Aug 2005 at 06:06 UTC

I switched from wordpress to drupal because drupal gave me the hope of a much more flexible web site.

However, since the switch my traffic has fallen to 1/5th (or less) what it was using wordpress.

One of the things I depended on was pinging the aggregation services. But drupals ping.module doesn't give much in the way of feedback nor configurability. To configure multiple pings, I had to edit the ping.module source, for example. And I just don't have any confidence that it's doing anything.

I just checked using technorati .. pasting in text from postings over the last few days. A post from 3 days ago is indexed by technorati, while ones from 2 days ago are not. Does this mean technorati isn't receiving the ping?

Comments

add a watchdog event for successful pings

varunvnair commented 26 August 2005 at 07:31

I have tweaked my ping.module file to register watchdog events in case of successful pings. I have also added more sites to be pinged.

Ideal solution is to make the ping module configurable so that you can simply add new services to be pinged without tweaking the source code. I think this is already a feature request.

Code is as follows:

function ping_ping($name = '', $url = '') {

  $feed = url('node/feed', NULL, NULL, TRUE);
  
  $client = new xmlrpc_client('/', 'rpc.pingomatic.com', 80);
  $message = new xmlrpcmsg('weblogUpdates.ping', array(new xmlrpcval($name), new xmlrpcval($url)));
  $result = $client->send($message);
  if (!$result || $result->faultCode()) {
    watchdog('directory ping', t('Failed to notify pingomatic.com (site).'), WATCHDOG_WARNING);
  }
  else
  {
    watchdog("directory ping", "successfully notified 'pingomatic.com (site).'", WATCHDOG_NOTICE);  
  }  
  
  unset($client);
  $client = new xmlrpc_client("/rpc/ping", "rpc.technorati.com", 80);
  $message = new xmlrpcmsg("weblogUpdates.ping", array(new xmlrpcval($name), new xmlrpcval($url)));
  $result = $client->send($message);

  if (!$result || $result->faultCode()) {
    watchdog("directory ping", "failed to notify 'technorati.com (site).'", WATCHDOG_WARNING);
  }
  else
  {
    watchdog("directory ping", "successfully notified 'technorati.com (site).'", WATCHDOG_NOTICE);  
  }  
  
  unset($client);
  $client = new xmlrpc_client("/", "ping.blo.gs", 80);
  $message = new xmlrpcmsg("weblogUpdates.ping", array(new xmlrpcval($name), new xmlrpcval($url)));
  $result = $client->send($message);

  if (!$result || $result->faultCode()) {
    watchdog("directory ping", "failed to notify 'blo.gs (site).'", WATCHDOG_WARNING);
  }
  else
  {
    watchdog("directory ping", "successfully notified 'blo.gs (site).'", WATCHDOG_NOTICE);  
  }    
  
  
}

There is also another service called pingoat.com . However I was unable to ping it from ping.module. I didnt get time to see why so that service is missing from the above list.

If I do get it to work I might post the code here...

My Drupal-powered Blog: ThoughtfulChaos - Varun's Blog

That helps, but

reikiman commented 27 August 2005 at 17:19

...but... I'm not getting the positive response in my log. So that verifies my suspicions, that my pings aren't going out.

First, it appears the only way ping_ping is called is from _ping_notify. And _ping_notify only gets called from ping_cron. Yes? I see no other invocation of a ping hook.

So in my logs there are several warnings associated with each cron run, and this message is one of them: Last cron run did not complete.

The other warnings are from the aggregator, concerning various feeds I've defined but are failing to parse. This must be for ones using the atom format.

Oh... shoot... it has nothing to do with the above. WHY IS NOT THE FOLLOWING REPORTED IN THE LOG? If I wget my cron.php, here's what I get:

<b>Fatal error</b>:  Cannot instantiate non-existent class:  xmlrpc_client in <b>/usr/www/users/davidh/modules/ping.module</b> on line <b>61</b>

Clearly that's my problem.

Hmmm... somehow in my upgrade process from 4.6.0 to 4.6.1 to 4.6.2 includes/xmlrpc.inc got out of line with the one from 4.6.2. So I just copied the one from 4.6.2 in-place of what's there, and redid my cron.php, and got notifications in the admin log that the pings succeeded. YAY!!

- David Herron - http://7gen.com/

+ David Herron - 7gen.com/, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com/drupal-blogging-hints

Reported

reikiman commented 27 August 2005 at 17:31

See http://drupal.org/node/29812

- David Herron - http://7gen.com/

+ David Herron - 7gen.com/, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com/drupal-blogging-hints

You do realize

laura s commented 27 August 2005 at 18:59

There was a security update release (4.6.3) nearly 2 weeks ago.
===
Laura
pingVision

_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet

Whoops

reikiman commented 27 August 2005 at 22:15

You're right - and I had applied that, so I am/was at 4.6.3 - and I'd forgot - and the xmlrpc.inc I had was from 4.6.3

Soo.... then.... ping.module is incompatible with the xmlrpc.inc in 4.6.3

Still, my issue report is valid 'cause the log shoulda been telling me of these fatal errors (and it wasn't)

Okay, what's incompatible with xmlrpc.inc 4.6.2 is the above code which is correct against the xmlrpc.inc in 4.6.2. The ping.module in 4.6.3 is compatible with the xmlrpc.inc in 4.6.3. Hence, I can follow the same pattern as given above, but the coding has to be different calls because the xmlrpc API in 4.6.3 is different.

So.... I've been updating this as I'm looking at the details.

What I did was recode my ping_ping method as follows. I just posted a test message, wget'd my cron.php, and this works against the 4.6.3 version of xmlrpc.inc. I have one comment on reviewing this code ... what if $url is blank? Will the ping services be okay?


/**
 * Implementation of hook_ping().
 *
 * Notifies pingomatic.com, blo.gs, and technorati.com of changes at this site.
 */
function ping_ping($name = '', $url = '') {

  $result = xmlrpc('http://rpc.pingomatic.com', 'weblogUpdates.ping', $name, $url);
  if ($result === FALSE) {
    watchdog('directory ping', t('Failed to notify pingomatic.com (site).'), WATCHDOG_WARNING);
  } else {
    watchdog("directory ping", t('successfully notified pingomatic.com (site).'), WATCHDOG_NOTICE);
  }
  unset($result);
  
  $result = xmlrpc('http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping', 'weblogUpdates.ping', $name, $url);
  if ($result === FALSE) {
    watchdog('directory ping', t('Failed to notify technorati.com (site).'), WATCHDOG_WARNING);
  } else {
    watchdog("directory ping",t('successfully notified technorati.com (site).'), WATCHDOG_NOTICE);
  }
  unset($result);
  
  $result = xmlrpc('http://ping.blo.gs', 'weblogUpdates.ping', $name, $url);
  if ($result === FALSE) {
    watchdog('directory ping', t('Failed to notify blo.gs (site).'), WATCHDOG_WARNING);
  } else {
    watchdog("directory ping", t('successfully notified blo.gs (site).'), WATCHDOG_NOTICE);
  }
  unset($result);
}

- David Herron - http://7gen.com/

+ David Herron - 7gen.com/, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com/drupal-blogging-hints

Fabulous

laura s commented 28 August 2005 at 00:37

I'll give it a try, as ping-o-matic so frequently seems to be down. It's an unfortunate bottleneck.

===
Laura
pingVision

_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet

I am getting notification of

rob30UK commented 16 October 2005 at 19:02

I am getting no notification of pings anywhere and to my knowledge they are not going.
I am using reikiman's last posted script.

Is there a ping settings in the admin? I enabled the module but thought there would be a way to change ping config.... if there is I cant find it.

Rob - SEO Specialist
Founder: www.webforumz.com

Same problem

Cheeky commented 24 October 2005 at 13:51

I have just used the code pasted above and I am not getting any notification in the watchdog. Perhaps someone can shed some light?

All Things Cheeky

Check the output from cron.php

reikiman commented 25 October 2005 at 04:48

If you read my other comments on this thread, the real breakthrough for me came when I manually fetched cron.php. I saw an error that led to the real solution.

The problem is that cron.php doesn't do its job properly -- and if errors happen, the errors are not caught and reported in the admin log.

See this problem report: http://drupal.org/node/29812

- David Herron - http://7gen.com/

+ David Herron - 7gen.com/, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com/drupal-blogging-hints

hook, not hack

moshe weitzman commented 21 August 2007 at 20:54

why not use hook_ping in a custom module instead of hacking core? there is a ping hook for just this purpose.

slogan and site name must be present

mcurry commented 31 August 2006 at 22:17

I know this is an older thread, but: it appears that the ping module in 4.7.x requires both the site name and slogan are non-empty in order to send a ping. Here's an excerpt from hook_cron() in ping.module:

  if (variable_get('site_name', 0) && variable_get('site_slogan', 0)) {
    if (db_num_rows(db_query("SELECT nid FROM {node} WHERE status = 1 AND moderate = 0 AND (created > '". variable_get('cron\
_last', time()) ."' OR changed > '". variable_get('cron_last', time()) ."')"), 1)) {
      _ping_notify(variable_get('site_name', '') .' - '. variable_get('site_slogan', ''), $base_url);
    }
  }
}

Note that it will fail silently if ither of these variables are empty - no watchdog entry will appear if no ping happens due to misconfigured site name and slogan.

farkedmanager.com

older post on this subject, including patch

mcurry commented 8 September 2006 at 02:45

http://drupal.org/node/36676

How do I know whether ping.module is working?

Comments

add a watchdog event for successful pings

That helps, but

Reported

You do realize

Whoops

Fabulous

I am getting notification of

Same problem

Check the output from cron.php

hook, not hack

slogan and site name must be present

older post on this subject, including patch

New forum topics

News items

Our community

Documentation

Drupal code base

Governance of community