[smokeping-users] FPing source code

[Cameron Davidson]

Hello,
	I have just installed a simple smokeping system for home, and I thought 
I'd thought I should summarise a few things that were difficult to find 
about FPing.

The smokeping installation page refers to www.fping.com. That page has 
two download links:
1. to the main Sourceforge page for fping, but that has zero listed 
downloads and nothing in CVS;
2. a link labelled 2.4b2_to-ipv6 pointing to fping.tar.gz on SF.
However, the second link actually only provides 1.4b2_to  (not the IPv6 
version)

I then noticed the warnings about '-S' missing, so I thought I'd at 
least get a current version.
I run Centos4, and found a version on RPMForge, but that is also missing 
  '-S'
I followed the debian bug link and eventually found the latest Debian 
source at http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fping.html
I was able to d/l the 2.4b2_to-ipv6 source and apply the diffs and then 
do a configure/make and it seems to work. There was no fping6 produced 
but I don't need it.

Judging by the thread in April 
https://lists.oetiker.ch/pipermail/smokeping-users/2007-April/002304.html 
  the fping.com site seems inactive.

Suggestion: it might be simpler if the installation notes pointed to the 
Debian code (for Linux users) and I don't know about BSD.

Suggestion 2: The only reason I really bothered with this was because I 
misinterpreted the other message on startup, where it says:
"### fping seems to report in 1 milliseconds"
I read this to mean that it was only resolving the time to multiples of 
1 ms. Since my LAN needs to test fractions of a ms, I thought I needed 
to get a different version.
It might save confusion if FPing.pm was changed to say something like:

if ( $1 == $2 ) {
   print "### fping seems to report in milliseconds (Good)\n";
} else {
   print "### fping seems to report in ", $1/$2, " milliseconds (old 
version?)\n";
}

Cheers,
Cameron.