[smokeping-users] TCPPing probe doesn't generate data

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi David,

On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, David Tomic wrote:

> I've also made sure that all the relevant paths are correct.

Are tcptraceroute and tcpping both in /usr/bin?  What's the result of
typing the commands

which tcpping

and

which tcptraceroute

?

Does it say /usr/bin/tcpping in your 'Probes' configuration file?

To be on the safe side I modified /usr/bin/tcpping so that the path
/usr/bin/tcptraceroute is explicitly stated in the script and doesn't
rely on some environment variable, which may or may not be set if you
run the script automatically.

> > Try commenting out all but the penultimate line there, so you have instead
> >
> > 8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > #       if echo "${ttr}" | egrep "\[(open|closed)\]" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
> > #               rtt=`echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $5}'`
> > #       else
> >                 rtt=`echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $4}'`
> > #       fi
> > 8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
>
> I've done that, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have helped.
>
> Now when I execute tcpping myself, I'm not getting the latency figures
> returned properly.

That didn't work then.  But it proves that you're modifying the right file. :)

> There still doesn't seem to be any data being passed through to
> smokeping either.  From 'smokeping --debug' I'm still just getting:
>
> 8<----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> TCPPing: forks 5, timeout for each target 76
> TCPPing: Executing /usr/bin/tcpping -C -x 5 203.16.214.17 80
> TCPPing: Executing /usr/bin/tcpping -C -x 5 internode.on.net 80
> TCPPing: 203.16.214.17: got
> TCPPing: internode.on.net: got
>
> 8<----------------------------------------------------------------------

It's just a matter of putting some debugging in there to see why the
right information isn't going where it's supposed to go.

> I hope I'm correct in thinking that I shouldn't need to do anything
> [beyond modifying tcpping] to actually have those changes take effect
> within Smokeping.

I'm sure you don't need to restart anything, this is just a bash script
and it won't be cached anywhere like Perl scripts can be sometimes.

> IE - Once I've modified/saved tcpping, then Smokeping should just
> automatically pick up on the changes the next time it executes the
> tcpping probe, correct?

Yes, it will just execute the new script.  (Apparently it's doing
that, because it fails in a different way, now. :)

> > With these debug lines inserted, but without my modification (sorry,
> > my nasty hack:), you'll see that the information you need moves from
> > field to field, depending on how you specify the host to be pinged:
> >
> ...
> I've done that, and I'm getting the same sort of output as you, but [if
> you'll pardon my ignorance] I'm still not really sure what that's
> actually achieved?

It's supposed to be telling you what the output from tcptraceroute
looks like and which fields are which.  In my examples, fields 4 or 5
might contain some number of milliseconds.  It's those numbers which
we need to get back to Smokeping via tcpping.  Unfortunately, tcpping
doesn't seem to be doing that.  It's supposed to decide whether to use
field 4 or field 5 in the bit of code that was (mostly) commented out
by my nasty hack.  We just need to know what's in the output from
tcptraceroute, and if it looks right figure out why it isn't reaching
Smokeping.

Let's step back a bit.

Bash is a shell.  It's the thing you're using when you type commands.
Probably.  You might be using a different shell, there are several to
choose from.  Bash is very powerful.  You can write programs with it
and run them from the command line.  A program written in the Bash
'scripting' language is called a script.  Bash scripts aren't very
pretty.  I guess you know that by now. :)  Incidentally, when you run
Bash itself you don't use the capital letter in its name.  Not 'Bash',
but 'bash'.

Bash scripts can call other scripts, system utilties, whatever they
need to get the job done.  In general the user who invokes the script
determines the permissions of the process(es) that execute, although
there are ways around that.

You have a Bash shell script called tcpping.  When you run it, it uses
a utility called tcptraceroute to fetch some information.  It takes
the output from tcptraceroute and parses it, that means it cuts out
the bits that it wants (using a text processing utility called 'awk')
and returns them to whatever program called it.  That program may be
Smokeping, your command line shell, or whatever.

There were two suggestions.

The first was to make a modification to tcpping to cut out some of the
code which parses the response from tcptraceroute.  That apparently
failed because the problem you have is different from the problem I
saw when I fetched the version of the tcptraceroute utility which
Debian provides for Etch and used it with the tcpping that I have.

The second suggestion was to put some print statements (the 'bash'
shell print statement is called 'echo') into the tcpping script in an
effort to find out what the script is seeing.  The bits of the script
which contain the calls to awk are pulling out fields from the output
from tcptraceroute.  Here are the debugging statements I used:

echo "${ttr}"

This first line prints a bash variable called ttr.  If you want to use
the value of a bash variable you can wrap it in curly braces and put a
dollar sign in front.  As I said, not pretty.  In the tcpping script,
this variable has been set to the output from tcptraceroute, which is
what we want to parse.  An example of the tcptraceroute output in my
last mail is (excluding the quotes) "255 192.168.0.43 [open] 0.184 ms".

echo ""

This prints a blank line.  I just felt like it.

echo "field 1 =" `echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $1}'`

Print the word "field" followed by the digit "1" and an equals sign
followed by whatever happens when 'awk' pulls out the first field of
its input, which in this case is whatever is in the variable ttr,
which is 'piped' to awk (using the pipe character, '|').

echo "field 2 =" `echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $2}'`
echo "field 3 =" `echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $3}'`
echo "field 4 =" `echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $4}'`
echo "field 5 =" `echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $5}'`
echo "field 6 =" `echo "${ttr}" | awk '{print $6}'`

And so on, for five more fields.

Why not post the output that you get?

> I still don't seem to be getting any data sent through to smokeping?

That's because it isn't fixed yet. :)

--

73,
Ged.