Poley, Jason wrote:
> Yeah, I get all that but what do you mean by 'lost?'  What exactly is this
> counting?  Errors reported by the device?  Lost polls? Who is loosing these
> packets and what kind of packets are you referring to?  I see no errors on
> any interfaces anywhere.

InterMapper polls devices by sending a request packet and receiving back a 
response packet. If InterMapper sends a
request packet and does not receive a response within the specified timeout 
(usually 3 seconds), IM counts that packet
as 'lost' and  retries the request. If InterMapper's request fails to elicit a 
response three consecutive times, the
device's status is set to down. (3 is the default)

With an SNMP probe, the lost packets are SNMP packets. There are three 
possibilities for where the packet was 'lost':

1. The request didn't reach the target device.
2. The target device did not generate a response within 3 seconds.
3. The response did not make it back to InterMapper.

The SNMP probe is slightly complicated by the fact that the final retry will be 
a ping packet instead of SNMP. We
implemented it this way after finding that some devices do not reliably answer 
SNMP packets on time. For example, a busy
router might leave SNMP packets unanswered, but answer pings immediately. 
(Responding to a SNMP query is more
computationally intensive than answering an ICMP echo). A device that answers 
the final ping retry is marked as "No SNMP
response".

If pings get through fine, but an occasional SNMP packet is lost to one 
particular device, my sense is that nothing is
wrong with the network. I would advise that you increase the threshold for 
packet loss for that one device to 10% and
leave it at that.

Let me know if this helps.

Regards,

Bill Fisher
Dartware, LLC

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