strange result in fping by hobbit and fping by yours truly

[Dennis Ortsen]

Hi everyone,

I've got a somewhat strange issue with fping in hobbit.

I've got a list of about 122 terminals that are used for a chipcard payment
system. Each one of them has an ip-address and connects to a server to
process the payments. Every now and then the terminals loose the connection
or whatever, they need to be reset before they can process the payments
again on the server. I thought I might use Hobbit to ping all the terminals
to see if they still respond to a ping. If they don't reply anymore, they
need a reset.

I only do a conn test on an ip-address. I use the full path to fping in
hobbitserver.cfg, without any extra parameters. When hobbit starts testing
the connection, only 14 terminals respond to a ping, but when I execute a
fping myself (as the hobbit user) in a shell to the same amount of
terminals, I get a totally different result, instead of 14 responding
terminals, I get 95 responding terminals with fping! It's not just a lucky
shot, I can keep on trying these terminals, the huge difference remains
whether I fping them myself or when hobbit fpings them.

I'm running hobbit 4.2.0. According to bbtest I have 806 hosts that are
pinged, that takes about 26 seconds to complete. To complete all tests
(954), it takes about 47 seconds.

Does anyone have a clue why specifically these terminals have such a
difference in hobbit ping and a ping performed by myself?

I can't explain it, and it doesn't seem like a timeout (latency) issue to me
either.

Thanks in advance,

Br.

Dennis