[BackupPC-users] Ping hangs and blocks if node is unreachable. w/ suggested fix.

[Josh M. <jo...@bl...>]

Craig,

I am running BackupPC on RH 7.3 w/ iputils ver. 20020124 rel. 3. I'm not =
sure if this problem is peculiar to this version of iputils, but I just =
noticed that backup jobs hadn't run for a few days, though most of the =
jobs from that day are still queued. Then I found the following =
processes from the day backups stopped:

root     15675 13468  0 Aug11 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/perl -T =
/home/backup/bin/BackupPC_dump launch2
root     15684 15675  0 Aug11 ?        00:02:01 /bin/ping -c 1 launch2

What I discovered is that ping waits until it gets a reply and =
everything else is blocked waiting for ping to finish.

Simple fix:=20

ping -w3 -c1 host

Causes to timeout and exit after 3 seconds. still returns non-zero if =
ping failed.

Not sure how portable this is, but please investigate. Maybe some others =
will comment?