Xymon Network Tests - Behaviour?

Apologies, I'll try this again....

Thank you for all the responses to my orginal questions.

In my environment, I try to minimize unecassary traffic.  My second
question seems answered by simply adding the 'noping' in the bb-hosts
file.  This would work for my needs.


Regarding the first question, I'm currently using Xymon 4.3.0.0 beta
2.  I'm assuming the tasks.cfg is used in the newer version(s)
4.3.3...?
I'll also assume the behaviour you describe is the same with the
[bbnet] and [bbretest] sections in the hobbitlaunch.cfg file in my
version.  Please let me know if I am wrong.


Thanks again,
Mario

On 25/08/2011, Mario Valetti <user-07d8eb56dcf0@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Thank you for

Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:42:21 +0200
From: <user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid>
To: <xymon at xymon.com>
Subject: Re: [Xymon] Xymon Network Tests - Behaviour?
Message-ID: <04b91460cd235e5018e5179c06657153 at localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:52:55 +0200, Mario Valetti <user-07d8eb56dcf0@xymon.invalid>
wrote:

Could someone please explain the exact behaviour when a host becomes
unreachable?

As I understand it, it works as follows...

- Xymon pings each host only once,
- if a reply is not received within a specified time (1sec), 3 ping
requests are sent out,
- from one of these three additional pings if a reply is received, the
host is not indicated as being unavailable and things continue
normally.  If a reply is not received from these three additional
requests, the host is marked as unavailable and four pings requests
sent out every minute until a response is received.

- Why do hosts show unavailable for 40s, 45s for example?  Are the
times above not fixed and rather work dynamically?

Not quite, but the normal test and the extra test are scheduled
independently (they are two different tasks in tasks.cfg). The only
restriction is that they will not run simultaneously. So when the first
test detects that the host is down, the extra test may run anywhere from
0
to 59 seconds after that.

Second question is regarding hosts that are shutdown for maintenance,
for example...
Usually, these are set to 'until ok' and the host marked blue with no
alerts.  However Xymon still sends an arp request / ping to check when
the host becomes available.

Is it possible to disable a host in a way that avoids Xymon checking
for the host at all?

No. How would Xymon detect that the host becomes OK without trying to
ping
it ?


Regards,
Henrik