.\"$Header: /home/vikas/netmgt/nocol/src/doc/RCS/pingmon.8,v 1.5 1994/11/29 20:12:56 vikas Exp $ .\" .TH PINGMON 8 "May 1994" .SH NAME pingmon \- NOCOL reachability monitor for hosts and network devices ( .BR ip pingmon, .BR rpc pingmon & .BR osi pingmon) .SH SYNOPSIS .B ippingmon [ .B \-d ] [ .B \-o .I ] [ .B \-p .I ] [ .I config-file ] .br .BI rpcpingmon ... .\" .SH DESCRIPTION .LP .BR ippingmon , .BR rpcpingmon , .B osipingmon are NOCOL monitors for testing reachability of remote hosts and network devices. .I ippingmon and .I osipingmon monitor reachability using ICMP echo requests, and .I rpcpingmon tests the status of the portmapper on remote hosts. .LP The ICMP monitors use the standard .I ping program to send 10 ICMP packets to the list of hosts specified in the configuration file and if the number of lost packets exceeds a certain threshold (set to 3 packets by default), the site is marked as DOWN and the NOCOL severity of the site is escalated. The severity is escalated in each pass if the site is still unreachable (till it reaches the maximum severity of CRITICAL). This gradual escalation of severity avoids false alarms since when a site is CRITICAL, it has been ping-ed and marked unreachable atleast 3 times. .LP In the case of .IR rpcping , a host is marked as down if the portmapper does not respond within a timeout interval (set to 20 secs by default in the .I rpcping program). Escalation of severity is similar to the method described for ippingmon above. .LP The programs do a .IR popen (3) call to the respective ping programs and parse the output to determine the status of the site. Two support programs are provided \- .I multiping and .I rpcping for use with the pingmon monitors. The .I osiping program is available with OSI protocol software and usually produces output similar to the IP ping program. .LP The .BR multiping (8) program is very useful to test a large number of sites via IP ICMP since it can take a large amount of time in each pass before a site is tested again. It is advisable to use this program instead of the standard Unix ping program. No such program is available (at this time) for OSI networks. .\" .SH OPTIONS .TP 5 .B \-d prints debugging output. .TP 3 .BI \-o " " The name of the nocol format datafile produced by ippingmon. By default, this file is .I ETCDIR/ippingmon-output. .TP 3 .BI \-p " " This is the path to the .I ping program to be used for sending ICMP packets to the remote hosts. This must produce output summary lines in the format: .RS .sp .nf navya% ping -s abc.foo.com 100 10 | tail -2 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 4/5/7 .fi .sp .RE Set the default location of the ping program during compile time (or if you are using .I multiping instead). .TP 3 .I This is the list of nodes to monitor (config file). By default, the files are expected to be in the ETCDIR and have the name .B ippingmon-confg or .B rpcpingmon-confg or .B osipingmon-confg (depending on the monitor being used\- IP ping, OSI ping or RPC ping). The format of this file is: .RS .sp .nf POLLINTERVAL sitename address sitename address sitename address TEST .fi .RE .sp The .I TEST keyword sets the NOCOP .I test option in the EVENT structure. This is useful to mark sites that are NOT in production yet and need to be monitored. The post-processors can then differentiate between test sites and production sites. .SH CAVEATS The program relies on external ping programs and expects to parse ping output in a pre-determined format. .\"------------------------------------ .SH AUTHOR Vikas Aggarwal, vikas@navya.com. .SH SEE ALSO netconsole(1) nocol-prog(3) perlnocol(3) etherload(8) eventselect(8) genmon(8) noclogd(8) nocol-overview(8) nocol-utility(8) nsmon(8) pingmon(8) portmon(8) tpmon(8) trapmon(8)