[smokeping-users] Default ping hosts

[Paul Bourke]

Hmm ok I think the penny may have dropped on this one :)

What I think SmokePing does by default is just ping the local webserver it
is running on and plots it's stats.  That would also explain the extremely
small range of my graphs (microseconds instead of milliseconds).

So, SmokePing is really only usefull if you have a host that:

1. Let's you ping them.
2. Doesn't mind you pinging them.

A little inconvenient, as one of my hopes for SmokePing was that I could see
the latency of my network before gaming on Xbox Live.  Though somehow I
don't think they would agree with me pinging their server's every .3 of a
second..  Same goes for Skype..

Anyone use it for either of the above services?

2009/5/28 Paul Bourke <pauldbourke at gmail.com>

> Thanks for the reply;
>
> Yes Im aware that the package maintainers may mess with the config but lets
> assume the default config that tarball from
> http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/pub/ uses.
>
> What do you mean by 'non existent ones'..?  I mean, I understand that
> putting some sort of server in there would most likely result in a DOS, but
> the packets surely are been sent somewhere?  How else can it measure RTT
> through ping?
>
> The config is quite uninformative in this regard..
>
> 2009/5/28 G.W. Haywood <ged at jubileegroup.co.uk>
>
> Hi there,
>>
>> On Thu, 28 May 2009, Paul Bourke wrote:
>>
>> > I was wondering, on a default install of smokeping (ubuntu 8.10), what
>> > host/hosts does it ping by default to measure RTT?
>>
>> I can't speak for Ubuntu, but as Debian is likely to be fairly similar
>> I'd say the answer is probably 'a bunch of non-existent ones'.
>>
>> I can't see that there would be any sense in putting a real 'default
>> host' in the config, since the odds are that it would be completely
>> irrelevant to the majority of users.  Furthermore with a popular
>> distribution you'd probably wind up DOSing the hapless default host
>> when thousands of people fire up a network application without reading
>> the documentation.  Or even the config. :)
>>
>> If you look in the configuration on the machine, it should tell you
>> what you need to know.  Alternatively, if this is just a hypothetical
>> question, you could contact the maintainer responsible for Smokeping
>> on Ubuntu and ask, or download the package file and look in there.
>>
>> Many distributions will offer any given package, and they do all kinds
>> of strange things with it (patch it, change the default locations of
>> nearly everything, setuid, run it in a sandbox...).  It's unreasonable
>> to expect the people who create the packages to keep abreast of all
>> the strange things that distribution packagers do with them.
>>
>> --
>>
>> 73,
>> Ged.
>>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.oetiker.ch/pipermail/smokeping-users/attachments/20090528/1c2c7b76/attachment.html