Smokeping? In 2026? Jesus…
Comment on Observability Stack?
Cyber@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Uptime Kuma if I want something to alert me (still trying to decide between ntfy & gotify)
Home Assistant is also checking some stuff
Smokeping for a general, long term feel of the network
Watchdog to reboot my Raspberry Pi Zeros when they fall off the wifi
non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Cyber@feddit.uk 1 week ago
What’s not to like?
Still alive & still maintained, and less resources than Grafana & Prometheus…
non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sorry, no disrespect intended, but I’m shocked. It’s like hearing someone say they drive a 1988 Toyota Cressida because it’s great… It was great at the time, but we’ve moved on and the smokeping website should tell you how ancient it is; sponsors from 2007 by companies that don’t exist anymore.
Still alive & still maintained
Alive, maybe. I think any maintenance is down to bodges to keep it running in modern environments. Neither Toby nor Niko have worked on sp in over a decade.
Smokeping is fine if all you do is look at its own graphs and you have enough traffic to see patterns in latency.
But:
- more or less unmaintained for a long time
- cgi scripts and scraping
- jitter is estimated from rping, not calculated with real values from more than one point on a route (that means a lot when you have a DMZ)
- Perl
- rrd tool is… Not great. Not very configurable, also unmaintained, lua support is not good, etc
- difficult to customize unless you use their submenu system
- no reporting, you get what you get with smokeping
I had to retire 2 smokeping monitors because their CGI implementations were security risks. That was 2015. Not a good reason for homelab, but CGI is a pretty ancient and insecure way to interact with the web server.
Smokeping is good in a big organization with lots of traffic and a few broadcast domains. It isn’t really great at monitoring remote sites because ICMP doesn’t tell you what segment in route is causing the issue, even with rping.
I used smokeping a lot in my career from about 2005 to 2015, when security audits made me retire it. Just even using rrdtool with an exporter and graphana would be preferable to smokeping itself.
Cyber@feddit.uk 1 week ago
Sorry, no disrespect intended, but I’m shocked. It’s like hearing someone say they drive a 1988 Toyota Cressida because it’s great…
How did you know I had an 88 Cressida? (jk)
You have good points there, but for a homelab, it does show some interesting insights (ie, I did an upgrade of my Raspberry Pi Zeros and saw how all their latency changed after the reboot… weird)
I’ve been using this for years as it just worked, but a recent update has broken it (a simple “v1.10 is earlier than v1.9” issue) and I had to rollback and have been waiting for someone to fix the bug for a few weeks, so, yep, the slowness of response is a fair point.
Ah, dunno, maybe I’ll look at some alternatives… one day…
nykula@piefed.social 1 week ago
What’s insecure about CGI? I thought the main reason it isn’t popular now is because runtimes are slow to start. Though IIRC when I used busybox httpd CGI with a small runtime, quickjs, speed wasn’t an issue.
krisbalintona@feddit.online 3 days ago
Did you ever decide on Ntfy vs Gotify?
Cyber@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Not yet 🙂
Both services work well, but the (Android) app is also a consideration… Gotify appears to keep losing the connection, but as I have different alerts going via different routes I need to sit down and spend some quality time with these, which I don’t have at the moment.
krisbalintona@feddit.online 3 days ago
I asked since I recently started using Ntfy and was just curious if you found something in Gotify that’s relevant to me
If you mean you send notifications to different services/platforms, you should look into Apprise, which is meant to do exactly this for you but easier supposedly