Background: In conjunction with running fetchmail every 10 minutes, I ping my ISP before running fetchmail. (My script is set up so that when I get "0% packet loss" on a sequence of 4 pings, it runs fetchmail (and then sendmail -q to kick the queue).)
Fairly often (several times a day?), I get one or more pings with an error message like: wrong data byte #0 should be 0x59 but was ... (see complete ping response, below:) Complete ping response: PING 206.245.176.211 (206.245.176.211): 56 octets data 64 octets from 206.245.176.211: icmp_seq=0 ttl=122 time=1099.4 ms wrong data byte #0 should be 0x59 but was 0x5858 ff 79 3d 79 6b a 0 8 9 a b c d e f 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 2a 2b 2c 2d 2e 2f 64 octets from 206.245.176.211: icmp_seq=1 ttl=122 time=268.4 ms 64 octets from 206.245.176.211: icmp_seq=2 ttl=122 time=283.4 ms 64 octets from 206.245.176.211: icmp_seq=3 ttl=122 time=251.6 ms In the above case, the wrong data byte occurred for only one of the pings -- in other cases it occurs for 2, 3, or 4 (all of the) pings, but usually (always?) for the earliest pings rather than the last pings. Questions: What is this telling me and/or how does it occur? This box is on a coax LAN, so I suppose it could be seeing TCP/IP traffic not meant for it -- is that likely to be the problem, or noise, or ??? What can I do to fix it? (I can't easily convert the LAN to TP as I'd have to run new cable which I prefer not to do in the near future -- maybe in a few years.) I suppose I should run a sniffer on the network, but there really should not be a lot of traffic. Can anybody recommend a sniffer that comes with Mandrake 7.2 or 8.2 (i.e., so I can install from an rpm)? thanks, Randy Kramer
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
