Checking host availability by using ping in bash scripts

Question

I want to write a script, that would keep checking if any of the devices in network, that should be online all day long, are really online. I tried to use ping, but

Answer 1

This seems to work moderately well in a terminal emulator window. It loops until there's a connection then stops.

#!/bin/bash

# ping in a loop until the net is up

declare -i s=0
declare -i m=0
while ! ping -c1 -w2 8.8.8.8 &> /dev/null ;
do
  echo "down" $m:$s
  sleep 10
  s=s+10
  if test $s -ge 60; then
    s=0
    m=m+1;
  fi
done
echo -e "--------->>  UP! (connect a speaker) <<--------" \\a

The \a at the end is trying to get a bel char on connect. I've been trying to do this in LXDE/lxpanel but everything halts until I have a network connection again. Having a time started out as a progress indicator because if you look at a window with just "down" on every line you can't even tell it's moving.