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OPING(8) liboping OPING(8)

NAME

oping - send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to network hosts

SYNOPSIS

oping [-4 | -6] [-c count] [-i interval] host [host [host ...]]

oping [-4 | -6] [-c count] [-i interval] -f filename

noping [-4 | -6] [-c count] [-i interval] host [host [host ...]]

noping [-4 | -6] [-c count] [-i interval] -f filename

DESCRIPTION

oping uses ICMPv4 or ICMPv6 ECHO_REQUEST packets to measure a hosts reachability and the network latency. In contrast to the original ping(8) utility oping can send ICMP packets to multiple hosts in parallel and wait for all ECHO_RESPONSE packets to arrive. In contrast to the fping utility (URL is listed in "SEE ALSO") oping can use both, IPv4 and IPv6 transparently and side by side.

noping is an ncurses-based front-end to liboping which displays ping statistics online and highlights aberrant round-trip times if the terminal supports colors.

OPTIONS

-4
Force the use of IPv4.
-6
Force the use of IPv6.
Send (and receive) count ICMP packets, then stop and exit.
Send one ICMP packet (per host) each interval seconds. This can be a floating-point number to specify sub-second precision.
Specifies the time to wait for an "ECHO REPLY" packet before giving up, in seconds. This can be a floating point number for sub-second precision. Defaults to 1.0 seconds.
Set the IP Time to Live to ttl. This must be a number between (and including) 1 and 255. If omitted, the value 64 is used.
Set the source address to use. You may either specify an IP number or a hostname. You cannot pass the interface name, as you can with GNU's ping(8) - use the -D option for that purpose.
Set the outgoing network device to use.
Instead of specifying hostnames on the command line, read them from filename. If filename is -, read from "STDIN".

If oping is installed with the SetUID-bit, it will set the effective UID to the real UID before opening the file. In the special (but common) case that oping is owned by the super-user (UID 0), this means that privileges are temporarily dropped before opening the file, in order to prevent users from reading arbitrary files on the system.

If your system doesn't provide saved set-user IDs (this was an optional feature before POSIX 2001), the behavior is different because it is not possible to temporarily drop privileges. The alternative behavior is: If the real user ID (as returned by getuid(2)) and the effective user ID (as returned by geteuid(2)) differ, the only argument allowed for this option is "-" (i.e. standard input).

Write measurements in Comma Separated Values (CSV) format to filename. This option writes three columns per row: wall clock time in (fractional) seconds since epoch, hostname and the round trip time in milliseconds.
Specify the Quality of Service (QoS) for outgoing packets. This is a somewhat tricky option, since the meaning of the bits in the IPv4 header has been revised several times.

The currently recommended method is Differentiated Services which is used in IPv6 headers as well. There are shortcuts for various predefined per-hop behaviors (PHBs):

Selects the Best Effort behavior. This is the default behavior.
Selects the Expedited Forwarding (EF) per-hop behavior, as defined in RFC 3246. This PHB is characterised by low delay, low loss and low jitter, i.e. high priority traffic.
Selects the Voice Admitted (VA) per-hop behavior, as defined in RFC 5865. This traffic class is meant for Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic which uses Call Admission Control (CAC) for reserving network capacity.
Selects one of 12 differentiated services code points (DSCPs), which are organized in four classes with three priorities each. Therefore, c must be a number between 1 through 4 and p must be a number between 1 through 3, for example "af13", "af22" and "af41". In each class, the lower priority number takes precedence over the higher priority number.
Selects one of the eight Class Selector PHBs. n is a number between 0 through 7. The class selectors have been defined to be compatible to the Precedence field in the IPv4 header as defined in RFC 791. Please note that "cs0" is synonymous to "be".

The old definition of the same bits in the IPv4 header was as Type of Service (ToS) field, specified in RFC 1349. It defined four possible values which have appropriate aliases. Please note that this use of the bits is deprecated and the meaning is limited to IPv4!

Minimize delay
Maximize throughput
Maximize reliability
Minimize monetary cost

Alternatively, you can also specify the byte manually. You can use either a decimal number (0-255), a hexadecimal number (0x00-0xff) or an octal number (00-0377) using the usual "0x" and "0" prefixes for hexadecimal and octal respectively.

The printed lines will contain information about the QoS field of received packets if either a non-standard QoS setting was used on outgoing packets or if the QoS byte of incoming packets is not zero. In other words, the QoS information is omitted if both, the outgoing and the incoming QoS bytes are zero. The received byte is always interpreted as Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), even if the deprecated Type of Service (ToS) aliases were used to specify the bits of outgoing packets.

Linux only Sets the mark (an integer number) on outgoing packets. This can be used by iptables(8) and other networking infrastructure for filtering and routing.
noping only -u forces UTF-8 output, -U disables UTF-8 output. If neither is given, the codeset is automatically determined from the locale.
noping only Selects the graph to display.
Do not show a graph.
Show a graph with time on the x-axis, the y-axis shows the round-trip time. This is the default graph.

If your terminal supports unicode and colors, they are used to improve the precision of the data shown: a green box is drawn for round-trip times up to one third of the configured timeout, the height representing the RTT. Longer RTTs will start to fill the box yellow (with a green background) and then red (with a yellow background). Lost packages are drawn as a bold red explamation mark.

Show a box plot where the x-axis, i.e. the width of the window, is the round-trip time. The entire width of the window it the ping interval, set with the -i option.

The box is sized so it contains 50% of the replies. The vertical line shows the median. The whiskers are sized to contain 95% of the replies -- 2.5% below the whiskers and 2.5% above.

  |----------[#####|##########]--------------------------------------------|
  ^          ^     ^          ^                                            ^
 2.5%       25%   50%        75%                                         97.5%
Show a histrogram of the round-trip times. The width of the window is taken as round-trip time from 0ms on the left to the interval (the -i option, default 1000ms) on the right.

The height of the graph is scaled so that the most-used buckets vertically fills the line. The buckets are colored green up to and including the 80th percentile, yellow up to and including the 95th percentile and red for the remainder.

Audible bell. Print a ASCII BEL character (\a or 0x07) when a packet is received before the timeout occurs. This can be useful in order to monitory hosts' connectivity without looking physically at the console, for example to trace network cables (start audible beep, disconnect cable N: if beep stops, the cable was in use) or to tell when a host returns from a reboot.

This relies on the terminal bell to be functional. To enable the terminal bell, use the following instructions.

  • the visual bell is disabled in your terminal emulator, with the +vb commandline flag or the following in your .Xresources: 

     XTerm*visualBell: false
  • the PC speaker module is loaded in your kernel: 

     modprobe pcspkr
  • X11 has the terminal bell enabled: 

     xset b on; xset b 100
  • and finally, if you are using PulseAudio, that the module-x11-bell module is loaded with a pre-loaded sample defined in your pulseaudio configuration: 

     load-sample-lazy x11-bell /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga
 load-module module-x11-bell sample=x11-bell
Configures the latency percentile to report. percent must be a number between zero and 100, exclusively in both cases. In general, defaults to 95. If -c is given and a number less than 20, this would be the same as the maximum. In this case the default is chosen so that it excludes the maximum, e.g. if -c 5 is given, the default is 80. The calculated percentile is based on the last 900 packets (15 minutes with the default interval).
If any hosts have a drop rate higher than percent, where percent is a number between zero and 100 inclusively, exit with a non-zero exit status. Since it is not possible to have a higher drop rate than 100%, passing this limit will effectively disable the feature (the default). Setting the option to zero means that the exit status will only be zero if all replies for all hosts have been received.

The exit status will indicate the number of hosts with more than percent packets lost, up to a number of 255 failing hosts.

COLORS

If supported by the terminal, noping will highlight the round-trip times (RTT) using the colors green, yellow and red. Green signals RTTs that are in the "expected" range, yellow marks moderately unusual times and times that differ a lot from the expected value are printed in red.

The information used to categorize round-trip times is the percentile. RTTs in the 80th percentile are considered to be "normal" and are printed in green. RTTs within the 95th percentile are considered "moderately unusual" and are printed in yellow. RTTs above that are considered to be "unusual" and are printed in red.

INTERACTIVE KEYBOARD CONTROLS

When running noping, the type of graph being displayed can be changed by using the g key. A new host can be added at any time with the a key.

SEE ALSO

ping(8), <http://fping.org/>, liboping(3)

LICENSE

oping and noping are licensed under the GPL 2. No other version of the license is applicable.

AUTHOR

liboping is written by Florian "octo" Forster <ff at octo.it>. Its homepage can be found at <http://noping.cc/>.

Copyright (c) 2006-2017 by Florian "octo" Forster.

2017-05-11 1.10.0