Frequently Asked Questions about Alarm Pinger

Jacek Konieczny

1. What is Alarm Pinger?
2. Can Alarm Pinger be user to monitor services?
3. Can Alarm Pinger use TCP/UDP/anything instead of ICMP for pinging?
4. Why can't I use host names for target names?
5. I don't want any messages mailed to me. How can I turn them off?
6. How can I graph apinger measurements?

1.	What is Alarm Pinger?
	Alarm pinger is a tool for network monitoring. It test periodically reachability of one of more network devices and the quality of their network connections.
2.	Can Alarm Pinger be user to monitor services?
	No. The only way Alarm Pinger monitor things is sending ICMP echo-requests and analyzing ICMP echo-replies. So only host reachability is tested.
3.	Can Alarm Pinger use TCP/UDP/anything instead of ICMP for pinging?
	No. It just do plain ICMP echo queries.
4.	Why can't I use host names for target names?
	Because it would be very hard to interpret results if the host name resolves to more than one IP address.
5.	I don't want any messages mailed to me. How can I turn them off?
	Just comment out mailto and mailfrom lines in `apinger.conf` file.
6.	How can I graph apinger measurements?
	You will need rrdtool installed on the system, where apinger is running. Make sure apinger will find it. You may pass the path to the configure script before apinger compilation. To make apinger actually store the measurements, you need to set rrd interval global configuration option to some time interval and rrd file target configuration option to path of the database which will be written by apinger. The database should be writable by user set with user option. To graph the stored measurements you can use rrdcgi script generated by apinger with `-g` option followed by path to a directory where the graphs will be stored. Usually you will also need to pass `-l` followed with location of those graphs as seen on the HTTP server.