[hobbit] Conn time discrepancy

[Alan Sparks]

wshart at hormel.com wrote:
> I've searched the archives and didn't find anything, I'm hoping someone
> here has some insight.
>
> Occasionally we'll notice some drastic change in the graphing on Xymon for
> the conn times, and when I bring these up with the networking folks they
> basically dismiss it because the labels on the side of the scale are
> "wrong".  What I'm seeing is that the Y axis is being labeled as "Seconds"
> with the "m" after the scale, and it reports around 40-80mS for ping times.
> This isn't what we're seeing from the box itself though when we execute the
> same hobbitping :
>
> From Xymon page :
> <host ip> is alive (44 ms)
>
> From command line on Xymon :
>
> <host ip> is alive (0.13 ms)
>
> What am I missing and why the discrepancy ?
>
> Bill Hart
>   

This is a known issue with the way hobbitping works, compared to fping. 
If you want realistic ping times, you need to use fping.  You'll need to
install fping, and change the "FPING" entry in hobbitserver.cfg.  Also,
be sure xymon can run it, since it usually installs setuid - either set
up a sudo mechanism to call it, or change the group on fping to the
xymon server's group and make sure it's setuid-root and group executable.
-Alan