[smokeping-users] Smokeping stop generate graph on Debian Stretch - Fping exited unexpectedly with status 256

[Marek Królikowski]

Hello
I check this what you say and not working:

Jul 12 20:39:27 smokeping smokeping[108511]: Alert bigloss is active for
DOM.DOM
Jul 12 20:39:27 smokeping smokeping[108511]: Wide character in syswrite at
/usr/share/perl/5.24/Net/Cmd.pm line 212.
Jul 12 20:39:27 smokeping smokeping[108510]: Child process 108511 (probe
FPing) exited unexpectedly with status 256.

root at smokeping:~# ls -al /usr/bin/fping
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 39232 sty 11 15:44 /usr/bin/fping

Best Regards
TaKeN

-----Original Message-----
From: ITheodoridis at bankofgreece.gr [mailto:ITheodoridis at bankofgreece.gr] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2017 3:46 PM
To: admin at wset.edu.pl; smokeping-users at lists.oetiker.ch
Subject: RE: [smokeping-users] Smokeping stop generate graph on Debian
Stretch - Fping exited unexpectedly with status 256

Hello.
I don't have any experience with Debian but in OpenSuSE and Ubuntu, also in
Rasbian (Rasberry PI deviant of Debian) fping needs to be setuid root, or
you get the same behavior (no data).
Try and get a listing for fping with a similar command to this (depending on
fping's location):
ls -al /usr/bin/fping
if you get something like this (not the s after the w) it should be fine:
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 30460 Aug 13  2014 /usr/bin/fping If not, the you
need to do the following:

chown root:root /usr/bin/fping
chmod u+s /usr/bin/fping

Btw the solution to this is not mine. Someone using FreeBSD had a similar
problem and Tobi (the well know Tobi) answered him so I have kept that
answer in my notes.
Here it is in full:
> Hello,
>
> I just tried upgrading fping on a FreeBSD host I have smokeping
> 2.6.7 running on and (to fping 3.4) and I noticed the graphs broke. I 
> dug a little deeper and found that fping won't run as requested due to 
> the smokeping process being run under an unprivileged user. If I run 
> the fping command as smokeping attempts as root, it will succeed. 
> Otherwise I get a can't create raw socket error.
>
> Is there a quick fix for this (other than obviously running smokeping 
> as root)? Can I give my smokeping user access to raw sockets somehow 
> or have smokeping spawn the fping process with higher privileges?

I guess you have to install fping setuid root:

chown root:root /usr/sbin/fping
chmod u+s /usr/sbin/fping

cheers
tobi

So there you go, I hope it helps.
Good luck! 
Yannis.

-----------------------------------------------------
Ioannis Theodoridis
Network & Systems Engineer
Network & Telecommunications Support
Informatics
Bank of Greece
-----------------------------------------------------