[Xymon] Xymon Network Tests - Behaviour?

[henrik at hswn.dk]

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:52:55 +0200, Mario Valetti <mariov652 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Could someone please explain the exact behaviour when a host becomes
> unreachable?
> 
> As I understand it, it works as follows...
> 
> - Xymon pings each host only once,
> - if a reply is not received within a specified time (1sec), 3 ping
> requests are sent out,
> - from one of these three additional pings if a reply is received, the
> host is not indicated as being unavailable and things continue
> normally.  If a reply is not received from these three additional
> requests, the host is marked as unavailable and four pings requests
> sent out every minute until a response is received.
> 
> - Why do hosts show unavailable for 40s, 45s for example?  Are the
> times above not fixed and rather work dynamically?

Not quite, but the normal test and the extra test are scheduled
independently (they are two different tasks in tasks.cfg). The only
restriction is that they will not run simultaneously. So when the first
test detects that the host is down, the extra test may run anywhere from 0
to 59 seconds after that.

> Second question is regarding hosts that are shutdown for maintenance,
> for example...
> Usually, these are set to 'until ok' and the host marked blue with no
> alerts.  However Xymon still sends an arp request / ping to check when
> the host becomes available.
> 
> Is it possible to disable a host in a way that avoids Xymon checking
> for the host at all?

No. How would Xymon detect that the host becomes OK without trying to ping
it ?


Regards,
Henrik