[smokeping-users] smokeping fping probe with high resolution / low interval possible?

[Aaron Boerup]

Updating to 2.006008 and using fping 3.2 seems to have solved my high resolution problems. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Boerup 
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2012 11:16 PM
To: 'G.W. Haywood'
Cc: smokeping-users at lists.oetiker.ch
Subject: RE: [smokeping-users] smokeping fping probe with high resolution / low interval possible?

Whoops, should have included those details.
Running smokeping version 2.006007
The "default" fping I'm using is 2.4b2_to $Date: 2002/01/16 00:33:42 I'm not much of a linux expert so I missed this obvious part. I did indeed have a problem with the smokeping daemon user not having sufficient privileges to go faster than 100ms. I fixed this and it does let me run a finer resolution than 100ms, though it seems to take much longer (and generating errors in the logs) than running the command manually. Its only able to do about 10-11 pings a second.
I've also downloaded fping 3.3 from www.fping.org but I can't seem to make this binary work for my smokeping. Not sure what it doesn't like, I've compared the output from the commands smokeping is sending and it looks identical other than access times. Running Ubuntu Server 12.04

For speed comparison

Fping 2.4b2
fping -c 3000 -i 1 -p 1 -q -s <hostname> yields me about 72 pings/second

Fping 3.3
fping -c 3000 -i 1 -p 1 -q -s <hostname> yields me about 860 pings/second

-----Original Message-----
From: G.W. Haywood [mailto:ged at jubileegroup.co.uk]
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2012 3:50 AM
To: Aaron Boerup
Cc: smokeping-users at lists.oetiker.ch
Subject: Re: [smokeping-users] smokeping fping probe with high resolution / low interval possible?

Hi there,

On Sat, 25 Aug 2012, Aaron Boerup wrote:

> ... problem with the shortest (most flood-like) interval for fping. If 
> I set the hostinterval to anything lower than .1 (which is
> 100ms) then I seem to get nothing but 100% packet loss on the graph. 
> Is this an intentional limit? If I do an fping <ip> -p 1 -I 1 -c 300 I 
> will be able to send all 300 packets in about 4 seconds.

There are several versions of fping in existence and you haven't said which one you're using.  If you read the man page for it you might find that fping itself places restrictions on the sorts of things that can be done by non-privilieged users, and you might discover things which can only be done by a user with root permissions.  Setting the interval between packets going to an individual target to something as low as one millisecond (if that's what '-p 1' does in your version of fping - it does in at least one of mine and there isn't an '-I' switch in any of them) is the sort of thing that would usually only be done by root, as it might be considered abusive.

> I would like to be able to do this kind of granularity for some 
> special troubleshooting I am doing.

Perhaps you can be more specific about the troubleshooting.

> My question is a way to get a combined multi-probe graph like you get 
> on the summary screen on the detail page. I did some looking and 
> didn't see an obvious way to do this.

I don't know what the "summary screen" and the "detail page" are.
You have acess to the full source to do whatever you wish to it, but there's a lot of fairly densely coded Perl in there and that will be hard going if you aren't an experienced Perl programmer.

--

73,
Ged.