There are no proper words to describe how much my current wireless internet connection sucks. Frankly, the situation is far from ideal - the provider's antenna is 858 meters from mine and did I mention the huge leaf tree some 30 meters from mine directly in the line of sight? Signal is good, but sometimes there are nearly 80% losses.

In an attempt to help the provider guys diagnose the occasional losses of connectivity and tune up the connection, I've scribbled this little Ruby probe, which I run on my OSX stack to automate this process for me. It takes a list of hosts, runs network diagnostics command(s) for each of them and dumps outputs into a timestamped subfolder of results/, which is then ZIPped up for better transport.

$ ruby probe.rb

The results subfolder can also optionally be tagged with an argument.

-- Petr Vostřel, 2012