NAME

       xymonping - Xymon ping tool

SYNOPSIS

       xymonping [--retries=N] [--timeout=N] [IP-addresses]

DESCRIPTION

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

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

       xymonping only handles IP-addresses, not hostnames.

       xymonping  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 xymonping is similar to that of "fping -Ae".

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

SUID-ROOT INSTALLATION REQUIRED

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

       xymonping  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 xymonping 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 xymonping 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
              xymonping 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 xymonping 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
              xymonping 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), xymonnet(1), fping(1)