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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
              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)