Provided by: xymon_4.3.0~beta2.dfsg-9.1_amd64 bug


       hobbitping - Xymon ping tool




       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).


       hobbitping needs to be installed with suid-root  privileges,  since  it  requires  a  "raw

       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.


              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.

              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.

              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.

              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.

              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.

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

