Gentoo Linux

This was working correctly in 1.8 by the way.

can't reproduce, works as expected here.
what does the last line look like from :
fping -p 200 -c 20 <some host>
on the zabbix server ?

a.b.c.d : xmt/rcv/%loss = 20/20/0%, min/avg/max = 0.83/1.88/8.50

grab item id from the url when configuring that item, then in the database :
select * from items where itemid='<that_itemid>' limit 10;

are values correct there or not ?

mysql> select * from history as h where h.itemid = 33713 limit 10;
---------------------------

---------------------------

---------------------------
10 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> select * from items as i where i.itemid = 33713 limit 10;
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

ergh, yes, the first one was what i had in mind - thanks for providing correct information despite incorrect instructions
do you have a chance to try svn head ? i don't see any changes for this part since 1.8.1, but just in case...

Took a while but I created a completely clean install on my local workstation using zabbix from svn head (r10101). I added a single host with a single item - icmppingloss. I still get the same result:

mysql> select * from history as h where h.itemid = 22162 limit 10;
---------------------------

---------------------------

---------------------------
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

I've figured out the problem but I'm not sure why Zabbix is doing what it is doing so I can't give you a patch.

Anyway, here's the story:

If Zabbix is compiled with IPv6 support it expects CONFIG_FPING6_LOCATION to be set or it won't ping at all. On Gentoo fping6 doesn't exist because fping contains the necessary patches for handling IPv6 addresses and as of v1.8.1 Gentoo enables the IPv6 useflag. To get pings working I had to point FPING6 to /usr/sbin/fping.

Next, Zabbix checks if CONFIG_SOURCE_IP is set, which it is not in my case (because I have multiple ip addresses to reach different networks). That means it'll fallback to run BOTH the fping and fping6 commands (line 93 in libs/zbxicmpping/icmpping.c "%s %s 2>&1 <%s;%s %s 2>&1 <%s") against the host effectively creating twice as many pings as requested (host->rcv is twice the items[i].count requested). This again screws up the "value_dbl = 100 * (1 - (double)hosts[h].rcv / (double)items[i].count);" calculation in pinger.c causing it to say x = 100 * (1 - 20 / 10) which gives -100.

thanks for the analysis, that should help a lot. issues related to fping/fping6 existence are being currently looked at, maybe this problem can be solved with that.

as for gentoo, are you installing from source or from gentoo data ? if the latter, it might be worth reporting a problem downstream so that gentoo would modify fping6 location.

Thank You very much for the deep analysis of the issue. It really helped a lot!

Issue ZBX-1876 will contain a necessary fix for this issue.

Dear Tais P. Hansen,

Thank you very much for reporting this issue. It will contain a fix in the linked one.
There is a workaround for you. Your "fping" can process both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Besides, you make SourceIP empty due to your network conditions, so Zabbix will ping both "fping" and "fping6". So, make "Fping6Location" parameter empty by adding "Fping6Location=". Then Zabbix will use only "FpingLocation".

But such behavior will be introduced in ZBX-1876.

Regards.

Thank you. I removed ipv6 support from zabbix to work around my problem for now. We're not currently monitoring ipv6 hosts anyway so it's no loss.

Hello, as requested by Richlv after discussion on IRC channel,
This problem seems to still exist in 1.8.3:

System Information:
CentOS 5.3 : Linux hercules.sim.local 2.6.18-128.2.1.el5.028stab064.4 #1 SMP Mon Jul 27 12:45:01 MSD 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

cat /etc/sysconfig/network
NETWORKING=yes
NETWORKING_IPV6=yes
HOSTNAME=hercules.sim.local
GATEWAY=10.0.0.1

Solution, as suggested by Richlv was to uncomment the Fping6Location option on the zabbix_server.conf and set to empty

1. Fping6Location=/usr/sbin/fping6
   Fping6Location=
   This solved the problem (please note that renaming fping6 binary also solved the problem)

server was installed from yum repository (http://centos.karan.org/ - [kbs-CentOS-Testing])

this was supposed to be fixed in 1.8.2, but apparently has regressed

Sorry forgot to include zabbix_server version and rpm's installed
zabbix_server_mysql -V
Zabbix Server v1.8.3 (revision 13928) (16 August 2010)
Compilation time: Sep 22 2010 12:23:29

rpm -qa * zabbix*
zabbix-web-1.8.3-2.el5.kb
zabbix-server-1.8.3-2.el5.kb
zabbix-agent-1.8.3-2.el5.kb
zabbix-server-mysql-1.8.3-2.el5.kb
zabbix-1.8.3-2.el5.kb
zabbix-web-mysql-1.8.3-2.el5.kb

Fixed in pre-1.8.4 in r16416.