Need to build a ping test for work network

[austina2]

This is my firs time posting and i am going to be as thorough as possible

my boss has requested that i make a python program on a raspberry pi (running raspbian), the parameters he requested are these:

the program should ping various network devices every 5 minutes
if the ping succeeds, send a signal to one of the GPIO pins
if the ping fails, send a signal to one of the GPIO pins

that signal will be sent to another device which will initiate an alarm.

I have come up with something based on internet searches, but i keep running into road blocks, and have a lot of questions...

here is the code i have:

=========================================

import ipaddress
import socket
import os


with open('test_list.txt') as fname:
           sw = fname.read().splitlines()
for s in sw:
    response = os.system('ping -n 2' + s)
    if response == 0:
               print(s, 'is up!')
    else:
               print(s, 'is Down!')

========================================


right now, i am getting this error, "if response= == 0 name "response" is not defined."

is it smart to run this based on a .txt file? i thought it would be good in case we want to add or remove IPs.

i am also wondering how to then take that output of the ping and make it trigger a high or low signal on the pin.

Sorry if this post broke all the rules... thanks in advance