HOBBITPING(1)						      General Commands Manual						     HOBBITPING(1)

NAME

       hobbitping - Xymon ping tool

SYNOPSIS

       hobbitping [--retries=N] [--timeout=N] [IP-adresses]

DESCRIPTION

       hobbitping(1) is used for ping testing of the hosts monitored by the xymon(7) monitoring system. It reads a list of IP adresses from stdin,
       and performs a "ping" check to see if these hosts are alive.  It is normally invoked by the bbtest-net(1) utility, which  performs  all	of
       the Xymon network tests.

       Optionally, if a list of IP-adresses is passed as commandline arguments, it will ping those IP's instead of reading them from stdin.

       hobbitping only handles IP-adresses, not hostnames.

       hobbitping  was	inspired by the fping(1) tool, but has been written from scratch to implement a fast ping tester without much of the over-
       head found in other such utilities. The output from hobbitping is similar to that of "fping -Ae".

       hobbitping probes multiple systems in parallel, and the runtime is therefore mostly dependant on the  timeout-setting  and  the	number	of
       retries.  With  the  default  options,  hobbitping  takes  approximately  18 seconds to ping all hosts (tested with an input set of 1500 IP
       adresses).

SUID-ROOT INSTALLATION REQUIRED
       hobbitping needs to be installed with suid-root privileges, since it requires a "raw socket" to send and receive ICMP Echo (ping) packets.

       hobbitping is implemented such that it immediately drops the root privileges, and only regains them to perform  two  operations:  Obtaining
       the  raw  socket, and optionally binding it to a specific source address. These operations are performed as root, the rest of the time hob-
       bitping runs with normal user privileges. Specifically, no user-supplied data or network data is used while running with  root  privileges.
       Therefore it should be safe to provide hobbitping with the necessary suid-root privileges.

OPTIONS

       --retries=N
	      Sets  the  number  of retries for hosts that fail to respond to the initial ping, i.e. the number of ping probes sent in addition to
	      the initial probe. The default is --retries=2, to ping a host 3 times before concluding that it is not responding.

       --timeout=N
	      Determines the timeout (in seconds) for ping probes. If a host does not respond within N seconds, it  is	regarded  as  unavailable,
	      unless it responds to one of the retries.  The default is --timeout=5.

       --responses=N
	      hobbitping  normally  stops pinging a host after receiving a single response, and uses that to determine the round-trip time. If the
	      first response takes longer to arrive - e.g. because of additional network overhead when first determining the route to  the  target
	      host  -  it may skew the round-trip-time reports. You can then use this option to require N responses, and hobbitping will calculate
	      the round-trip time as the average of all of responsetimes.

       --max-pps=N
	      Maximum number of packets per second. This limits the number of ICMP packets hobbitping will send per second, by enforcing  a  brief
	      delay  after  each  packet is sent. The default setting is to send a maximum of 50 packets per second. Note that increasing this may
	      cause flooding of the network, and since ICMP packets can be discarded by routers  and  other  network  equipment,  this	can  cause
	      erratic behaviour with hosts recorded as not responding when they are in fact OK.

       --source=ADDRESS
	      Use  ADDRESS  as	the source IP address of the ping packets sent.  On multi-homed systems, allows you to select the source IP of the
	      hosts going out, which might be necessary for ping to work.

       --debug
	      Enable debug output. This prints out all packets sent and received.

SEE ALSO

       xymon(7), bbtest-net(1), fping(1)

Xymon							    Version 4.2.3:  4 Feb 2009						     HOBBITPING(1)