Ping Problems

[Doug Owens]

Anyone know of any bugs in the vxWorks ping facility. My system seems to
hang in the middle of a ping even though the timeout is 5 seconds. I am
using 5.3.1 on an MVME1603 200Mhz PPC. This problem seems to appear only
when the system being pinged is off line.

Thanks,
Doug Owens
owe...@llnl.gov

[Robert Armstrong]

I have used ping() extensively without problems, the last time I ran it from
Friday afternoon to Monday morning between an NT box and a StrongARM Brutus
without a single failure (switched ethernet, little external traffic).

Bob

In article <v03007804b3560aab7b36@[128.115.48.115]>, Doug Owens

[sausti...@my-dejanews.com]

In article <v03007804b3560aab7b36@[128.115.48.115]
>,
Doug Owens <owe...@llnl.gov> wrote:
> Anyone know of any bugs in the vxWorks ping
facility. My system seems to
> hang in the middle of a ping even though the
timeout is 5 seconds. I am
> using 5.3.1 on an MVME1603 200Mhz PPC. This
problem seems to appear only
> when the system being pinged is off line.
>
> Thanks,
> Doug Owens
> owe...@llnl.gov
>
>

Yes, this is a known problem with the VxWorks
ping, in fact mine is the 3rd SPR entered into
their system about it. No clear picture of when
they are going to fix it, but I think I
understand what the problem is:

If you're pinging node A from your vxworks host B,
and A responds, everything is fine. If there's
no response, that's also fine, you'll get a 5
second timeout. However, if there's a router X
that provides the IP route between A and B and it
determines that A can't be reached, it will
return an ICMP Destination Host Unreachable or
Destination Network Unreachable packet rather
than the ICMP Echo Reply packet that vxworks is
expecting, so the ping() routine will hang
forever. See RFCs 1349 and 1812 for information
on ICMP.

There's some ping() code in the VxWorks Archive,
I'm going to have a look at that and see if I
want to make that work.
ftp://ftp.atd.ucar.edu/pub/vxworks/vx/ping01

I would suggest any ping'ers out there contact
your vxworks rep and press to have a patch or fix
to this implemented, that will help percolate it
up their priority list.

Stuart Austin
IMCI Technologies
sau...@imci.net
(703) 723-2416

--== Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ ==--
---Share what you know. Learn what you don't.---