Believe it or not, this is an OLD bug in ping... search the archives -- I
analyzed and posted the info quite a while back (over a year IIRC). The
problem can happen when your link is quite busy and ping response are
delayed longer than the ping timeout value... it's a race condition in
ping...
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 ge
