Where's Mah Intertubes

By popular demand (of a single cheesecakemonger)

Have you ever signed up with a shoddy Internet provider, where you get sudden and frequent connection failures that prevent your router from, well, routing? Are you getting tired of trying to stare down your modem in wait for the Internet connection to get up again after one of these failures? Maybe you'd prefer there to be some kind of script that you could use to be instantly notified when the connection gets back on, so you can both instantly resume obsessively browsing ICHC and get out of the living room into the kitchen and maybe do some dishes as your provider persists that crappy service is just what you need?

Well, this is the script you are looking for. You can run it after your connection went down and it'll play some sound when the connection is back again. That'd be if you run it (using some awesome sound effects from Battle for Wesnoth) as:

./wheresmahintertubes.py \
    --yay=/usr/share/games/wesnoth/1.8/data/core/music/defeat.ogg \
    --boo=/usr/share/games/wesnoth/1.8/data/core/music/victory.ogg &

Hell, you can even put it into your startup applications in Gnome or something (I figure making it into an init.d start-up script would be a bit overkill). Simplest way I can think of to do that in Ubuntu would be to go to System -> Preferences -> Starup Applications, there press Add and put the same command as above into the field aptly named Command.

The script has zero innovative mechanics: it tries to connect to Google by IP every 30 seconds and then plays an appropriate bit of accidental music through PyGame's mixer.

I figured pinging Google like that is the simplest way to determine whether the connection is up or down. Sure, it's not perfect, but it'll work well enough with the benefit of working within 5 minutes of me starting to write the script. Anyway, the timeout, the address, and the delay between checks can all be configured using the friendly commandline interface (i.e. command switches: --timeout, --uri, --delay).

Using PyGame is also a bit suspect in this application (overkill, mostly) and I did initially plan it to use Gstreamer but PyGame is 4 times less code written on my end, but neither requires suspiciously GTK-related libraries, nor does it mysteriously hang up or disobey orders... Indeed, it just works, and chances are you already have it installed on a lot of systems anyway, because you wanted to play Slingshot st some point...

So, here's the code. Enjoy.

 
  1 #!/usr/bin/python 
  2 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- 
  3 # 
  4 # Where's Mah Intertubes?! 
  5 # 
  6 # A simple script that lets you know when your connection goes down or comes  
  7 # back up with sounds.  
  8 # 
  9 # Depends: 
 10 #   espeak                (if you don't want to use sound files) 
 11 #   pygame                (if you do) 
 12 # 
 13 # Options: 
 14 #   -h, --help            show this help message and exit 
 15 #   --speak               recite a message when connection goes on or off 
 16 #                         (default) 
 17 #   --off=AUDIO_OFF, --boo=AUDIO_OFF 
 18 #                         set a sound played when connection is lost 
 19 #   --on=AUDIO_ON, --yay=AUDIO_ON 
 20 #                         set a sound played when connection is back on 
 21 #   -t TIMEOUT, --timeout=TIMEOUT 
 22 #                         set timeout for checking if connection works (default: 
 23 #                         10s) 
 24 #   -d DELAY, --delay=DELAY 
 25 #                         set delay between connection checks (default: 30s) 
 26 #   -u URI, --uri=URI, --url=URI 
 27 #                         ping this URI to see if connection works (default: 
 28 #                         http://74.125.77.147) 
 29 #   -v, --verbose         display information about things done by the program 
 30 # 
 31 # Examples: 
 32 #   Let's say you want to check if you can connect and you're fine with the  
 33 #   espeak dude to moan about it instead fo using a cool sound you can use one 
 34 #   of the following (let it run in the background): 
 35 #    
 36 #   ./wheresmahintertubes.py & 
 37 #   ./wheresmahintertubes.py --speak & 
 38 # 
 39 #   If you want some proper fun sounds then all you need is point them out: 
 40 # 
 41 #   ./wheresmahintertubes.py --yay=file/for_on.ogg --boo=file/for_off.mp3 & 
 42 # 
 43 # License: 
 44 #   Copyright (C) 2010 Konrad Siek <konrad.siek@gmail.com> 
 45 # 
 46 #   This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it  
 47 #   under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, as published  
 48 #   by the Free Software Foundation. 
 49 #  
 50 #   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but  
 51 #   WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranties of  
 52 #   MERCHANTABILITY, SATISFACTORY QUALITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR  
 53 #   PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details. 
 54 #  
 55 #   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along  
 56 #   with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. 
 57 # 
 58  
 59 import time
 60 import sys
 61 import pygame
 62  
 63 quiet = False 
 64 uri = "http://74.125.77.147" 
 65  
 66 def printerr(*args):
 67     if quiet:
 68         return 
 69     from sys import argv, stderr
 70     from os.path import basename
 71     stderr.write("%s:" % basename(argv[0]))
 72     for arg in args:
 73         stderr.write(" %s" % arg)
 74     stderr.write("\n")
 75  
 76 def printout(*args):
 77     if quiet:
 78         return 
 79     from sys import argv, stdout
 80     from os.path import basename
 81     stdout.write("%s:" % basename(argv[0]))
 82     for arg in args:
 83         stdout.write(" %s" % arg)
 84     stdout.write("\n")
 85  
 86 def can_has_connection(timeout):
 87     import urllib2
 88     printout("Checking ping to", uri)
 89     try:
 90         urllib2.urlopen(uri, timeout=timeout) # Google 
 91     except urllib2.URLError as error:
 92         return False 
 93     return True 
 94  
 95 class Speaker:
 96     def __init__(self):
 97         self.library = {}
 98  
 99     def add_to_library(self, key, path):
100         self.library[key] = path
101  
102     def play_from_library(self, key):
103         if not key in self.library:
104             return False 
105         self.play(self.library[key])
106         return True 
107  
108     def play(self, message):
109         from os import system
110         system('espeak %s' % message)
111  
112 class PyGamePlayer:
113     def __init__(self):
114         pygame.init()
115         self.library = {}
116  
117     def add_to_library(self, key, path):
118         self.library[key] = path
119  
120     def play_from_library(self, key):
121         if not key in self.library:
122             return False 
123         self.play(self.library[key])
124         return True 
125  
126     def play(self, path):
127         pygame.mixer.Sound(path).play()
128  
129 class Checker:
130     def __init__(self, delay, timeout):
131         self.delay = delay
132         self.timeout = timeout
133  
134     def run(self):
135         connected = can_has_connection(self.timeout)
136         printout('Initially the connection is', 'on' if connected else 'off')
137         while True:
138             time.sleep(self.delay)
139             current = can_has_connection(self.timeout)
140             if connected != current:
141                 connected = current
142                 self.react(connected)
143  
144     def react(self, connected):
145         from threading import Thread
146         printout('The connection just went', 'on' if connected else 'off')
147         def run():
148             self.player.play_from_library(connected)
149         thread = Thread()
150         thread.run = run
151         thread.start()
152  
153 if __name__ == '__main__':
154     from optparse import OptionParser
155     from os.path import basename
156     from sys import argv
157  
158     usage = '\n%s [OPTIONS] ' % basename(argv[0]) + \ 
159         '--on=[SOUND FILE] --off=[SOUND FILE]\n' + \ 
160         '\tplay a sound when network connection goes up or down' + \ 
161         '\n%s [OPTIONS] ' % basename(argv[0]) + '--speak\n' + \ 
162         '\trecite a message when network connection goes up or down (boring...)' 
163  
164     description = 'Wait around and periodically check if the connection ' + \ 
165         'went up or down, and if that happens play an appropriate sound to ' + \ 
166         'indicate it to the user. Network connectivity is check by the ' + \ 
167         'the simple method of connecting a specific host address, and ' + \ 
168         'assuming that the entwork is down if it takes too much time for ' + \ 
169         'that host to respond.' 
170  
171     parser = OptionParser(usage=usage, description=description)
172  
173     parser.add_option('--speak', action='store_true', dest='speak', \ 
174         help='recite a message when connection goes on or off (default)')
175     parser.add_option('--off', '--boo', action='store', dest='audio_off', \ 
176         help='set a sound played when connection is lost')
177     parser.add_option('--on', '--yay', action='store', dest='audio_on', \ 
178         help='set a sound played when connection is back on')
179     parser.add_option('-t', '--timeout', action='store', dest='timeout', \ 
180         help='set timeout for checking if connection works (default: 10s)', \ 
181         default=10, type='int')
182     parser.add_option('-d', '--delay', action='store', dest='delay', \ 
183         help='set delay between connection checks (default: 30s)', \ 
184         default=30, type='int')
185     parser.add_option('-u', '--uri', '--url', action='store', dest='uri', \ 
186         help='ping this URI to see if connection works (default: %s)' % uri, \ 
187         default=uri)
188     parser.add_option('-v', '--verbose', action='store_true', dest='verbose', \ 
189         help='display information about things done by the program')
190  
191     opts, args = parser.parse_args()
192  
193     quiet = not opts.verbose
194     uri = opts.uri
195  
196     player = None 
197  
198     if opts.speak or not opts.audio_on or not opts.audio_off:
199         player = Speaker()
200         player.add_to_library(True, "Connection just went up")
201         player.add_to_library(False, "Connection just went down")
202     else:
203         player = PyGamePlayer()
204         player.add_to_library(True, opts.audio_on)
205         player.add_to_library(False, opts.audio_off)
206  
207     checker = Checker(delay=opts.delay, timeout=opts.timeout)
208     checker.player = player
209  
210     try:
211         checker.run()
212     except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):
213         printout('Exiting...')
214         running = False 

The code is also available on GitHub at python/wheresmahintertubes.py.