[smokeping-users] FPing alternative

[Niko Tyni]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 10:04:17AM -0800, Israel Brewster wrote:
> Is there a plugin for smokeping that just does a standard ping, using  
> the system ping binary? Using FPing I have to give it a hostinterval =  
> 15.0 directive in order to get any sort of reliable return, and even  
> then I have to limit the number of pings it sends out to no more than  
> 6 or so. If I try to shorten the host interval, or increase the number  
> of pings, I start loosing packets. For example, if I reduce the  
> hostinterval to 10 seconds, I get a maximum of 3 packets back.  
> Obviously, this isn't a reasonable monitoring scenario.
> 
> On the other hand, if I just run a standard ping from the command  
> line, it works fine with no lost packets even if I tell it to send a  
> packet every millisecond rather than every second. As such, I was  
> wondering if there was some way I could just use the standard ping  
> rather than FPing to monitor these hosts? I tried echoping at one  
> point in the past, but it didn't seem to work any better. Thanks!

You probably didn't get any answer because this is a very uncommon
situation but you didn't give any details about your configuration.

It certainly sounds like there's something wrong with your fping, and I
think fixing it is a better approach than looking for alternatives. Does
it work as badly from the command line too? Did you compile it yourself
or is it supplied by your OS vendor/distribution? Which version is it? What
platform are you running on? Does the packet size affect the loss?

There's no plugin for a "standard ping", as far as I know, but fping is
generally much better than those.

Cheers,
-- 
Niko