Re: Download Fping For Mac
Roseanne Gennett
fping is a program to send ICMP echo probes to network hosts, similar toping, but much better performing when pinging multiple hosts. fping has a verylong history: Roland Schemers did publish a first version of it in 1992 and ithas established itself since then as a standard tool for networkdiagnostics and statistics.
There was no official fping release from 2002 until end of 2011. Variouspatches existed, but were never integrated "upstream". Also, the officialmaintainer didn't answer emails, so I decided to just step up and take overmaintenanceship. If you feel that I did wrong, please contact me.
To mark this change of maintenance, and avoid confusion, I decided to callit version 3. Besides a new maintainer, fping now also features a completelyrewritten main loop implementation which improves performance significantly. The run time is now close to thetheoretical time required to send and receive the pings under the specifiedparameters.
We tried to run up a couple of older VPS using Debian 10 which we have existing installations working fine and run the kickstarter script again - same issue. 1.37 installs fine but no fping.plugin file appears.
I have probably just done this too quickly as my experience was with the fping plugin. It seems simple enough to add the hosts to the config file. I run the test to see it was indeed getting data from the hosts being pinged but when it comes to the Netdata panel I have lost the plot. Perhaps there is another step I am missing but the info I can read says the build should have it enabled and it looks so from netdata.conf and I just added the hosts section to the ping.conf and restarted netdata.
I am trying to save the outputs of fping in to a variable in Bash, this should be easy but I just cant get it to work. I have tried various methods, tried using things like AWK and CUT on the captured variable but comming up with empty varibles.
fping is a ping like program which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol(ICMP) echo request to determine if a target host is responding. fpingdiffers from ping in that you can specify any number of targets on the commandline, or specify a file containing the lists of targets to ping. Instead ofsending to one target until it times out or replies, fping will send out aping packet and move on to the next target in a round-robin fashion.
Either just quick and dirty add your setting there (if the surrounding code changes it could block your updates)
Or add another setting like the other fping settings to control packet size and submit it for upstream inclusion.
We have enabled fping on our server and configured it to run every minute. We are receiving icmp alerts every so often for a few devices. I ran a continuous ping from my machine and looks like the device lost 1 ping. Do we need to disable icmp checks if we have fping running? It seems like the regular icmp checks that the pollar uses is set a little too picky. We have the following options set.
i'm running a zabbix-server container to monitor various services and hosts. by default it uses fping for icmp checks however fping will always fail regardless of targetIP and when checked manually will come back as 'IP is unreachable'. can be 127.0.0.1, 10.88.0.1, 192.168.1.1, or any of the various host IP's i use successfully with zabbix-agent for detailed checks.
zabbix container clearly has connection to my router and receives icmp. Router also responds to zabbix-agent fine so it appears to be something specific to fping. A quick search comes up with nothing useful on either zabbix forums or elsewhere so that makes me think it's not a wide common problem and maybe container cfg somehow.
With the nmap scan we get back 8 hosts that are alive on the network vs the 7 reported by fping. That extra host is 10.142.111.213 but why? Let us take a closer look at what fping is doing vs nmap using the -sn parameter.
fping will first send out arp requests for each host on the subnet it is scanning. If a host replies to the arp request with its MAC address fping will then take that IP address and send an ICMP echo request message to it (ping).
Shown above are the arp request and the arp reply. Next the fping tool sends an ICMP echo request to 10.142.111.213. But if you look at the capture there is no response found! This host has probably been set up to not respond to ICMP messages.
So the reason that fping does not show the 10.142.111.213 in its scan results is down to the fact that the host is configured not to respond to the ICMP ping request which is perfectly normal and is a good security practice.
Number of bytes of ping data to send. The minimum size (normally 12) allowsroom for the data that fping needs to do its work (sequence number,timestamp). The reported received data size includes the IP header(normally 20 bytes) and ICMP header (8 bytes), so the minimum total size is40 bytes. Default is 56, as in ping. Maximum is the theoretical maximum IPdatagram size (64K), though most systems limit this to a smaller,system-dependent number.
The IPv4 address parser is very flexible;on most (if not all) systems,it will interpret 127.0.1 as equivalent to 127.0.0.1. So, if you fping 127.0.1,and fping produces a line of output that begins 127.0.1,and you also have an argument like 1.7.0.1,that will be treated as a regular expression that matches 127.0.1. You can overcome this as follows:
fping sends a packet to one address and then jumps to the next one immediately. This can be accomplished over an IP address range of an entire subnet, or with the help of a text file. A response or packet loss will be noted by fping and returned via the console. The output of fping is quite easy to parse, so other accomplished processes can be triggered (there are examples on fpings man page which are linked below).
Check an entire subnet with a:
fping -g 192.168.20.0/24
With this command fping starts with 192.168.20.1 and after it reaches .254 it starts again from the beginning and passes this process 3 times.
fping is a small command line tool to send ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) echo request to network hosts, similar to ping, but much higher performing when pinging multiple hosts. fping totally differs from ping in that you can define any number of hosts on the command line or specify a file with the list of IP addresses or hosts to ping.
For example, using fping, we can specify the complete network range (192.168.0.1/24). It will send Fping request to host and move to another target host in a round-robin fashion. Unlike ping, Fping is meant for basically scripting.
The following command will fping a specified range of IP addressees. With below output we are sending echo request to range of IP address and getting reply as we wanted. Also cumulative result shown after exit.
The archive on the Nagios Exchange shows a C program which - assuming with my really weak C knowledge - implements fping functionality itself. And browsing the source code, it looks like the program is just checking for UID 0. If it is not run as root, then it just outputs that error message and quits. Instead of checking for the required capabilities.
Python 2.7 on Linux or Mac OS X (Python 3.5 compatibility is in the works,but not there yet.)
- netaddr library (e.g. pip install netaddr)
- Custom, forked build of fping (see Installation).
Download Source Package fping:
- [fping_4.2-1.dsc]
- [fping_4.2.orig.tar.gz]
- [fping_4.2.orig.tar.gz.asc]
- [fping_4.2-1.debian.tar.xz]
- Ubuntu MOTU Developers (Mail Archive)
Other Packages Related to fping
- depends
- recommends
- suggests
- enhances
- dep:libc6 (>= 2.15) [amd64, s390x] GNU C Library: Shared libraries
also a virtual package provided by libc6-udeb dep:libc6 (>= 2.17) [arm64, ppc64el] dep:libc6 (>= 2.27) [riscv64] dep:libc6 (>= 2.28) [armhf] - dep:libcap2-bin POSIX 1003.1e capabilities (utilities)
- dep:netbase Basic TCP/IP networking system
- enh:netdata (>= 1.5) real-time performance monitoring (metapackage) Download fping Download for all available architectures ArchitecturePackage SizeInstalled SizeFiles amd6431.7 kB87.0 kB [list of files] arm6431.7 kB87.0 kB [list of files] armhf30.9 kB75.0 kB [list of files] ppc64el34.6 kB103.0 kB [list of files] riscv6429.9 kB76.0 kB [list of files] s390x31.8 kB91.0 kB [list of files] This page is also available in the following languages:
Quite often, when we do the troubleshooting of our networks and systems, we want to figure out, which hosts are alive in the certain range. The quickest and the easiest way (though, not 100% accurate) is to run the ping against a specific range of IPs. There is a brilliant tool for this purpose, which is called fping.
The good thing about fping is that it supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, even in a single test, what makes it quite valuable for testing your environment as a whole.
Besides the direct results of the reachability test (telling if host/hosts are reachable or not), fping also allows you to measure the reachability with a certain constrains (e.g., max TTL, max response time, etc) and even to measure the latency.
In the simplest scenario, the execution of the fping tests is very simple. You just need to type the fping address, where address is the IPv4 or IPv6 address of the host you are willing to test.
Like other examples you have seen in these series, the fping can be perfectly integrated into the automation you use in troubleshooting. For example, you run the reachability test and then connect to the live hosts to test the HTTP/GRPC service or send the report with unreachable hosts over the mail towards the engineers on shift. The possibilities for automation are endless.
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