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MPING(8)		     System Manager's Manual			MPING(8)

NAME
     mping  -  send  ICMP  ECHO_REQUEST  packets  to multiple network hosts in a
     round-robbin fashion.  Mping support both IPv4 and  IPv6  adresses  at  the
     same time.

SYNOPSIS
     mping [ -rqvpmfn46a] [ -c count] [ -i interval] [ -s packetsize] [ -w wait-
     time] hosts...

DESCRIPTION
     The  DARPA Internet is a large and complex aggregation of network hardware,
     connected together by gateways.  Tracking a single-point hardware or  soft-
     ware  failure  can  often be difficult.  Mping utilizes the ICMP protocol's
     mandatory ECHO_REQUEST datagram to elicit an ICMP ECHO_RESPONSE from  hosts
     and  gateways.   ECHO_REQUEST  datagrams  (``pings'')  have  an IP and ICMP
     header, followed by a struct timeval,  and  then  an  arbitrary  number  of
     ``pad''  bytes  used to fill out the packet.  Default datagram length is 64
     bytes, but this may be changed using the command-line option.

     Mping sends one datagram per second, and prints  one  line  of  output  for
     every  ECHO_RESPONSE  returned.   No  output is produced if there is no re-
     sponse.  If an optional count is given, only that	number	of  requests  is
     sent  to  each  host.  Round-trip times and packet loss statistics are com-
     puted.  When all responses have been received  or	the  program  times  out
     (with  a count specified), or if the program is terminated with a SIGINT, a
     brief summary is displayed.

OPTIONS
     -r     Bypass the normal routing tables and send directly to a host  on  an
	    attached  network.	 If  the host is not on a directly-attached net-
	    work, an error is returned.  This option can be used to ping a local
	    host through an interface that has no route through it (e.g.,  after
	    the interface was dropped by routed(8C)).

     -q     Quiet  output.  Nothing is displayed except the summary line on ter-
	    mination.

     -v     Verbose output.  ICMP packets other than ECHO RESPONSE that are  re-
	    ceived are listed.

     -p     Packed  output.  Redundant	text  is removed, to save diskspace when
	    large amount of output is to be saved to disk.

     -m     Print out median instead of max.

     -f     Print out 10/50/90-percentile instead of min/avg/max.

     -n     Don't look up ip-numbers. Without this option,  mping  will  try  to
	    look up ip-numbers given as output, and translate them to hostnames.

     -4     Prefer IPv4 adress on multiple DNS hits.

     -6     Prefer IPv6 adress on multiple DNS hits.

     -a     Automatically  scale  SI  time units (sec/msec/usec). Note that this
	    has no effect if used together with -p, as this will make mping  de-
	    fault to using msec.

     -c count
	    Number of packets to send to each host.

     -i interval
	    Time  (in msec) to wait between each packet is sent out. The packets
	    are sent out in a Round Robin fasion, so when a packet  is	sent  to
	    the  last  host,  the next packet to the first host is sent waittime
	    msec after. The default setting is 10 packets per second.

     -s packetsize
	    Size of the data space of the ICMP packet (-8 bytes).

     -w waittime
	    Time (in msec) to wait before a packet time-out and is  reported  as
	    lost (This option is not implemented yet).

RESOURCES
     This  program  is intended for use in network testing, measurement and man-
     agement.  It should be used with care not to overload the	network  or  the
     host it's running on.

DETAILS
     An IP header without options is 20 bytes.	An ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packet con-
     tains  an	additional 8 bytes worth of ICMP header followed by an arbitrary
     amount of data.  When a packetsize is given, this indicate the size of this
     extra blob of data (the default is 56).  Thus the amount of  data	received
     inside  of an IP packet of type ICMP ECHO_REPLY will always be 8 bytes more
     than the requested data space (the ICMP header).

     If the data space is at least eight bytes large, ping uses the first  eight
     bytes of this space to include a timestamp which it uses in the computation
     of round trip times.  This explains why if less than eight bytes of pad are
     requested, no round trip times are given.

BUGS
     If using mping on an IPv6 network, you will need a kernel which support au-
     tomatic  packet  checksum	generation  for IPv6. For GNU/Linux this means a
     fairly new kernel is needed, namely >= 2.4.19.

     Mping need to be setuid and owned by root to be executed  by  unpriviledged
     users.   Please  consider	the security issues involved if you decide to do
     this.

     The program is developed under GNU/Linux, and tested to work on  GNU/Linux,
     NetBSD  and  FreeBSD.  Mping will probably work on most *NIX platforms, but
     feedback is appreciated.

HISTORY AND AUTHORS
     Mping-1.0 originally written by Vegard Engen for  UNINETT	in  1996,  based
     heavily on ping(8) by Mike Muus. Mping-1.0 was developed on SunOS.

     Mping-1.3	was  a bugfix version written by Frank Aune for UNINETT in 2002.
     Mping-1.3 was developed on GNU/Linux and designed to run on NetBSD.

     Mping-2.0 is a rewrite of Mping-1.0 and Mping-1.3 and was written by  Frank
     Aune and Stig Venaas for UNINETT in 2003. Mping-2.0 is based on ping(8) and
     ping6(8) from the UNIX iputils package. Mping-2.0 is developed on GNU/Linux
     and NetBSD, and is designed to run on both platforms.

SEE ALSO
     ping(8), ping6(8), netstat(1), ifconfig(8C)

AVAILABILITY
     Mping  is	available from http://mping.uninett.no, where you can see how we
     utilize this simple tool in our network services.

				   Sep 1, 2003				MPING(8)
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