HOBBITPING

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: Version 4.2.2: 15 Dec 2008
Index Return to Main Contents
 

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 overhead 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 hobbitping 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
pt the following tags - others are silently ignored: NOCOLUMNS, COMMENT, DESCR, CLASS, dialup, testip, nobb2, nodisp, noinfo, notrends, TRENDS, NOPROPRED, NOPROPYELLOW, NOPROPPURPLE, NOPROPACK, REPORTTIME, WARNPCT, NET, noclear, nosslcert, ssldays, DOWNTIME, depends, noping, noconn, trace, notrace, HIDEHTTP, browser, pulldata. Specifically, note that network tests, "badTEST" settings, and alternate pageset relations cannot be listed on the ".default." host.

 

SENDING SUMMARIES TO REMOTE XYMON SERVERS

summary ROW.COLUMN IP URL
If you have multiple Xymon servers, the "summary" directive lets you form a hierarchy of servers by sending the overall status of this server to a remote Xymon server, which then displays this in a special summary section. E.g. if your offices are spread over three locations, you can have a Xymon server at each office. These branch-office Xymon have a "summary" definition in their bb-hosts file that makes them report the overall status of their branch Xymon to the central Xymon server you maintain at the corporate headquarters.

Multiple "summary" definitions are allowed.

The ROW.COLUMN setting defines how this summary is presented on the server that receives the summary. The ROW text will be used as the heading for a summary line, and the COLUMN defines the name of the column where this summary is shown - like the hostname and testname used in the normal displays. The IP is the IP-address of the remote (upstream) Xymon server, where this summary is sent). The URL is the URL of your local Xymon server.

The URL need not be that of your Xymon server's main page - it could be the URL of a subpage on the local Xymon server. Xymon will report the summary using the color of the page found at the URL you specify. E.g. on your corporate