Indeed I am! HN readers are a fun group. I am receiving beeps almost every second, so I updated my previous shell script to keep a record of the connections netcat receives. Also, converted the beeping loop to a background job, so that the outer netcat loop does not have to wait for the inner beeping loop to complete before handling the next connection. Notice the '&' before the last 'done' in the improved alerting service below:

  while true; do (echo ok | nc -q 1 -vlp 8000 2>&1; echo; date -u) | tee -a beeper.log; for i in 1 2 3 4; do printf '\a'; sleep 1; done & done

Here is a log of the timestamps of the connections received so far: https://gist.github.com/susam/159c7d92659b3185eb0b0d683998a3...