Bug 63456 - packet loss, ping result differs between ping programs
Summary: packet loss, ping result differs between ping programs
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: iputils
Version: 7.2
Hardware: i686
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Phil Knirsch
QA Contact: Aaron Brown
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2002-04-14 06:54 UTC by Glenn McKechnie
Modified: 2015-03-05 01:10 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2003-05-14 14:10:29 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
Ping results showing differences mentioned in bug report (4.25 KB, patch)
2002-04-14 07:09 UTC, Glenn McKechnie
no flags Details | Diff

Description Glenn McKechnie 2002-04-14 06:54:45 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020310

Description of problem:
The ping program  supplied with RH7x  and that compiled from the netkit-base 
source produce different results. This has become evident  with the results
returned 
using  ping -c 10 wcarchive.cdrom.com 


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.use RH's version of ping to check wcarchive.cdrom.com - high packet loss
2.use netkit's version of ping to check wcarchive.cdrom.com - "normal" loss

	

Actual Results:  Swapping between the two programs produces different results.
The difference is reproducible - as much as ping results are reproducible!

Expected Results:  Slight variation instead of the large differences returned.

Additional info:

I run a script with results at
http://members.optushome.com.au/graybeard/status/status.html
which for the last 4 days has been returning high packet loss from 
wcarchive.cdrom.com.

The last two graphs on that page display this, they are duplicate daily and
weeklys graphs when wcarchive.cdrom.com ping loss was too high to record.
Other  than that they don't show much else :-)

The other status (ping) scripts running on the external (Optus cable) network 
were not showing the problem (2 *BSD boxes).

I blamed the external node that my modem is attached to, however on double
checking my internal network I realized one machine had no problems. This
machine is compiled from source (LFS); it uses netkit-base-0.17 for it's ping

There are three RH72 machines on my internal network and they all exhibit
similar behaviour (see attachment).

Comment 1 Glenn McKechnie 2002-04-14 07:09:29 UTC
Created attachment 53769 [details]
Ping results showing differences mentioned in bug report

Comment 2 Phil Knirsch 2002-05-21 10:36:22 UTC
Have you tried the Skipjack version on the RH 7.2 box? I'd be interested if it
is somehow connected with the glibc/kernel we have (that is, if those are still
original ones from RH that is ;-).

Read ya, Phil

Comment 3 Glenn McKechnie 2002-05-21 12:39:14 UTC
>Have you tried the Skipjack version on the RH 7.2 box?

Do you mean move the ping-RH7292 over to the Enigma box and run it there? then Nope!
The Skipjack ping was run from machine #3 as ping-RH7292 (ping utility,
iputils-ss020124)

Neither Glibc nor the kernel were altered on any machine - stock standard one
and all [ I've got an unnamed fourth machine for playing with ;-) ]

The skipjack version did behave differently though, from the attachment....

  the real time was displayed as 3m25.240s

"real    3m25.240s" 

  whereas ping maintained it was quicker at 194955ms

"20 packets transmitted, 20 received, 0% loss, time 194955ms"

At least Skipjack returned a comparable result to the netkit-base run, even
though in real time it took longer to complete, unlike the other machines
(Enigma) where it just went through the roof on packet loss.

That Skipjack however is no more - it's now a RH7.3


I quickly redid the test on machine #1 as listed on
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=53769
but the problem doesn't exist at the moment, it appears to have disappeared as
mysteriously as it appeared!
It was only ever that one site (out of the six) and it had apparently worked
okay for 6+ months prior to that hiccup.

I've reinstated the original RedHat ping so that the ping-status script on
machine #1 will use it rather than the netkit one. If (when?) it occurs again
I'll let you know.

Cheers, Glenn


Comment 4 Phil Knirsch 2002-05-21 13:01:48 UTC
The reason i asked was that in Skipjack resp. 7.3 (Valhala) i switched to a very
new version of the iputils package which has a nearly completely rewritten ping
in it, so the result with the time is interesting, but no drops.

My gut feeling is that it has something to do with DNS. There is another iputils
related bug which reports something similar, and there the problem disappears if
the hosts are entered in /etc/hosts instead of being looked up via DNS.

Maybe you can give that a try when you experience the problems once more. Just
put the ip addresses in /etc/hosts. Only for checking, that is. Just want to
make sure it might be the same problem so i don't need to track 2 problems
unecessarily. :-)

Read ya, Phil



Comment 5 Phil Knirsch 2003-05-14 14:10:29 UTC
I haven't been able to reproduce this problem in the latest releases anymore, so
i'm closing this bug as currentrelease.

Read ya, Phil


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