Smokeping targets

Thu Jan 7 16:18:39 UTC 2016

On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Andrew Dampf <adampf at gmail.com> wrote:
> Something I found that is helpful once you've gathered a list of targets is
> the following command for generating config to paste:
>
> traceroute -w 3 [IPaddress] | grep -v "*" | grep -v "traceroute" | sed -e
> 's/(//g' -e 's/)//g' | awk '{ gsub(/\./,"_",$2); print "++++ "$2"\nmenu =
> "$3"\ntitle = "$2" - "$3"\nhost = "$3"\n"}'
>
> That generates a valid output for configs to ping each hop along the way to
> your destination, which can be super useful. Not all of them allow ICMP but
> a decent amount do.
>

curious... why is pinging along the path interesting?

nodes on the network which process packets for routing purposes tend
to handle local destination packets vastly differently from transit
packets... additionally, there's no guarantee that the path to the
device you are pinging is congruent with the path to the far end you
traceroute to, so I'm not even sure you'd be testing the path
correctly anyway.

> On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Brian R. Swan <swannie at swannie.net> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I’m setting up smokeping to try and gather some latency statistics on my
>> ISP to different parts of the world.  Does there exist a list or any
>> generic recommendations of different targets to config within smokeping?

one thing I'd recommend is NOT publishing a list of 'ping these for
useful results', there are enough people that already ping /8.8.8.8/
or /4.2.2.2/ or /favorite website/ that there are definitely cases of
intermediate paths parts limiting traffic for monitoring.

Isn't the question to ask here: "Why don't you monitor things you care
about access to?"

For instance, if your mailserver is smtp.example.com perhaps testing
access over time to that is important?

>> Google and searching the NANOG mailing list have failed me, and I don’t
>> want to just spam random IP addresses with ICMP requests if there’s a more
>> official/accepted method for doing this.
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Brian