[smokeping-users] FPing alternative

[Israel Brewster]

On Apr 17, 2008, at 8:24 AM, Niko Tyni wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the response. To provide more details: yes, the command  
line is just as bad- actually, the description I gave is from the  
command line, as it is much easier to run scenarios directly than by  
modifying the smokeping configs. However, smokeping shows the same  
behavior, and I used the same parameters as smokeping is when I was  
testing. FPing was compiled from the source provided in the OpenBSD  
4.2 ports tree, version 2.4b2_to. All devices being pinged are Linksys  
RV082 routers, with various firmware versions, but only a handful of  
these routers being monitored are showing the issue, so it's not an  
inherent issue with the Linksys routers. It could well be something  
with the links to the specific routers, but if so there is nothing I  
can do about that (as they are public WAN links, and as such outside  
my control), and therefore I would need a workaround, such as the  
standard ping I mentioned (which is apparently not an option). Packet  
size has no noticeable effect. What is so different between the  
packets FPing sends and the packets ping sends that could cause this  
difference anyway? Thanks again!

-----------------------------------------------
Israel Brewster
Computer Support Technician
Frontier Flying Service Inc.
5245 Airport Industrial Rd
Fairbanks, AK 99709
(907) 450-7250 x293
-----------------------------------------------
>
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Niko
>
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