Current source code: pinger.c.
Doxygen documentation: here.
For high resolution pinging pinger does send a ping every second and calculates the exponential moving average of 10, 1000 and 86400 pings, with removing of outliners by a simple cutoff.This script is for plotting a data file from pinger.
Replacing an ethernet gigabit Switch (D-Link DGS-1008D) by a 4 cm extension adapter at 18:44
reduces the RTT [ms] of Pings with a packet size of 44 Bytes between two PCs by about 30 µs.
WiFi measurements are much noisier than ethernet gigabit measurements but pinger shows that increasing the distance between a WiFi router
and WiFi adapter from 0.70 m to 2500 m increases the RTT about 38.6 µs.
Right picture: A WiFi measturement with a distance of 2.5 km at the
Aalbäumle observation tower
on the (small) mountain Langert.
The red lights at the right side half way up are from the
Sender Aalen on the (small) mountain
Braunenberg.
Site at the Linuxtag 2014 about my talk about pinger, with slides etc.:
Hochauflösende Netzwerküberwachung mit Pings.
The complete article about pinger in the Linux-Magazin 07/2014:
Hochauflösende Netzwerküberwachung mit Pings.
The article about pinger in the Linux Magazine #165:
Pinger -
The Pinger network monitoring tool uses ping to look for switches and estimate cable lengths..
It is easy to make the pinging with hard realtime to get better results.
First you only need a kernel with the RT_PREEMPT patch,
see
https://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RT_PREEMPT_HOWTO.
This is not complicated because some repositories have such an kernel, so you can simply install it with aptitude install or a
similar command.
And doing a new kernel is not complicated, as described in the RT PREEMPT HOWTO. But the configuration is a little complicated
because there are (2015-06) 14 RT_PREEMPT options which have to be set but many make targets, e. g. tinyconfig or oldconfig,
produce a .config with less options which causes a kernel which is NOT a realtime kernel.
Second you only have to set the posix thread priorities and sheduling algorithm. An example is the program multithreaded_logger
multithreaded_logger.
So in the source code you do not need big changes, only some lines more.