how-to install smokeping on fedora 9/10

Smokeping - http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/ - is an AWESOME tool to keep track of the latency of your sites, servers, and best of all your ISP! Currently I have ATT Uverse and I'm loving it, however, I used to live in a more rural area and had to use a fixed wireless ISP for my "broadband". They often had issues and had minimal monitoring on their end so they depended on users telling them when things were not going so well (reactive and not proactive, great...).

Smokeping pings each destination on a regular interval and graphs each response noting packetloss and jitter with "smoke".

I personally use it to ping my home router along with a very reliable url such as www.fedora.com. This helps when I am seeing a high amount of packet loss as I can just call up my ISP and point them to my website so that they can see first hand the trends that are occurring and cannot deny the degraded service in any way.

A sample of a smokeping is shown below.


On both debian and fedora smokeping can be found in the default repositories. Once this has been installed all you need to do is configure '/etc/smokeping/config'

Example noted below.

+ trunty

menu = trunty
title = Travis Runty's ping tests

++ Home

menu = trunty's home connection
title = Trunty's home Internet America connection (UVERSE)
host = kyle.travisrunty.com

Once you have made the configuration changes save them and restart the smokeping daemon.