Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 13211
ping ignores -c and -w options for non-local hosts
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:56 EDT
The following works only if a host is on the local subnet and down: ping -c 5 down.local.network (or ping -w 5 down.local.network) For non local host, this will run forever or until stopped by Ctrl-C: ping -w 2 down.remote.network PING down.remote.network (aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd) from (rrr.sss.ttt.uuu) 56(84) bytes of data. (time passes, much more than 2 seconds, pressing Ctrl-C) --- down.remote.network ping statistics --- 43 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss The same happens with '-c 2'. RedHat 6.1, netkit-base-0.10-37. The problem does not exist in RedHat 5.2 (netkit-base-0.10-13).
This bug will be propably marked as a duplicate of bug 8724, with the suggestion to install iputils from the rawhide distribution. Two comments: a) iputils from rawhide can not be installed with the standard rpm command (error message: "only packages with major numbers <= 3 are supported by this version of RPM") b) It is in my eyes a bad idea to put a bugfix for one package (netkit-base)in a package with a different name (iputils). That breaks the idea behind the -F option of the rpm command. At least for distributions that come with netkit-base there should also be fix with the same name.
If this is important for you, I suggest you install rpm-3.0.5 binary from ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/test/ and --rebuild iputils SRPM using it. That way you can use it in 6.x too. I agree that "change" of package name can be unfortunate, but you just can't stick to certain names and contents forever and also try to maintain full backward compatibility; That'd be just too much work. Linux world is developing and changing rapidly :). Critical bugfixes and security issues are usually packported though. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 8724 ***