[Bigsister-general] BS 0.98c8: uxmon call to ntptrace causes slams CPU

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In advance, please forgive me if this issue is corrected in a newer 
release of Big Sister. I realize that I'm not running the latest Big 
Sister software.

Presently, I have more than 400 hosts, routers, and switches that 
BigSister monitors on a Debian 3.1 (testing) [i386 arch.] system. The 
computer is a PII 400 MHz Compaq server that generally handles testing, 
displaying, logging, and alarming fairly well. This main display server 
handles the bulk of testing.  There are several remote agents, BB4, and bs 
clients out there sending in data periodically but not in the quantity 
that the system in question handles. 

Moving onto the problem, I have noticed trouble doing NTP testing within 
the last month or two . Further, I discovered that uxmon calls ntptrace 
and doesn't handle it properly and so the CPU utilization goes very high. 
The impact of the high CPU condition on the bsdisplay box is that the 
bsmon is unable to keep up with the reports and the web page display 
frequently indicates purple status. When I take out the 'ntp' test and 
restart big sister, everything is fine and the CPU is fine despite the 
sizeable battery of tests and their frequency. Strangely it seems that the 
 Debian ntp package has been static for several years.

I eventually determined what test was causing the high CPU condition by 
using uxmon with the "-D 5" debug option . Sorry that I don't have the 
text handy providing more detail. If someone wants me to dig it up I can. 
I believe that the ntp package in Debian may have changed recently.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Is there a fix to the ntp problem? 
Could it be that I had a mis-configured uxmon-net file? I have been 
testing NTP on these same servers for several years without the CPU issue.

kind regards,

Jim Russell
System Admin


P.S. -- does anybody have a script to report on monitoring statistics such 
as host count, test count, etc.?

P.P.S. - Minor issue to note: during uxmon debug, fping shows this 
message: 
        fping: Could not parse response 'ICMP Host Unreachable from 
172.20.9.1 for ICMP Echo sent to 172.20.10.58'ICMP Host Unreachable from 
172.20.9.1 for ICMP Echo sent to 172.20.10.58


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