== Description
   A collection of classes that provide different ways to ping computers.

== Prerequisites
   * Ruby 1.8.0 or later
   * The win32-open3 (1.8.x) and windows-pr libraries are required on
     MS Windows when using the Net::Ping::External class unless you're
     using JRuby.
   * Windows 2000 or later is required to use the Ping::WMI class.

== Installation
   gem install net-ping

== Notes
   Please read the documentation under the 'doc' directory. Especially pay
   attention to the documentation pertaining to ECONNREFUSED and TCP pings.

   Also note the documentation regarding down hosts.
   
   You do not need win32-open3 with Ruby 1.9.x. The open3 library that ships
   as part of the Ruby standard library should work.

== How to require net-ping
   You can do either this:

   require 'net/ping'

   In which case you will get Net::Ping and all of its subclasses. Or,
   you can load individual subclasses like this:

   require 'net/ping/tcp'

   The former has the advantage of being easier to remember and all inclusive,
   not to mention backwards compatible. The latter has the advantage of
   reducing your memory footprint.
   
== Known Issues
   Older versions of Ruby 1.9.x may not work with UDP pings.
   As of JRuby 1.5.1, UDP pings will return false positives because of an
   incorrect error class being raised. See JRuby-4896.

== License
   Artistic 2.0
   
== More documentation
   If you installed this library via Rubygems, you can view the inline
   documentation via ri or fire up 'gem server', and point your browser at
   http://localhost:8808.