Ping

Tool Name: ping

Tests TCP reachability: opens one TCP connection to host:port and closes it. This is NOT ICMP, so it needs a listening port (default 80) and says nothing about other ports or ICMP. Single attempt, no loss statistics; latency includes DNS resolution. Read-only, but it connects off-host and honors the user's network: policy in mcp-sudo.yaml. timeout is whole seconds (default 5). A failed connect is not a tool error: the JSON has success: false and an error text. Returns JSON with host, port, success, latency_ms and error. For DNS only use network/nslookup, for the hop path network/trace-path, for an HTTP check network/curl.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Required	Description
`host`	string	yes	Hostname or IP address to connect to
`port`	number	no	TCP port, whole number (default 80)
`timeout`	number	no	Seconds, whole number (default 5)

Example

Every example below shows the equivalent linuxctl command and the raw MCP JSON-RPC call it resolves to. The raw call always follows the same two-step pattern (see MCP API overview for the full explanation): open an SSE stream to get a one-time POST endpoint, then POST the JSON-RPC request there - the result streams back on the SSE connection.

linuxctl

linuxctl get network ping 127.0.0.1

Output:

{
  "host": "127.0.0.1",
  "port": 80,
  "success": false,
  "latency_ms": 0.264,
  "error": "dial tcp 127.0.0.1:80: connect: connection refused"
}

curl (raw MCP JSON-RPC)

# 1. Open the SSE stream (in the background) and capture the one-time POST endpoint
curl -N -s --cacert mcpd.crt -H "Authorization: Bearer $MCP_TOKEN" https://localhost:9091/sse &
# server sends: event: endpoint / data: /message?session_id=...

# 2. POST the tools/call request to that endpoint
curl -s --cacert mcpd.crt -X POST "https://localhost:9091/message?session_id=<from step 1>" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MCP_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": "1", "method": "tools/call", "params": {"name": "network/ping", "arguments": {"host": "127.0.0.1"}}}'

# 3. The result arrives on the SSE stream opened in step 1

Response:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": "16",
  "result": {
    "content": [
      {
        "type": "text",
        "text": "{\n  \"host\": \"127.0.0.1\",\n  \"port\": 80,\n  \"success\": false,\n  \"latency_ms\": 0.264,\n  \"error\": \"dial tcp 127.0.0.1:80: connect: connection refused\"\n}"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Arguments​

Example​

Arguments

Example