By default ping will only ping 5 times!?!?

Help
1

If this is an issue specific to nixpkgs should I open a github issue there?

I’ve read the entire manpage on this platform, it states ping comes from iputils. I can’t even find a flag to pass to fix this. -c 0 spits this error message:

ping: invalid argument: '0': out of range: 1 <= value <= 9223372036854775807

In my experience on every linux platform ever ping will run until told to quit by the user, however on NixOS the default action is to stop after icmp_seq reaches 5?

This is absolutely baffling and seriously hamstring my ability to troubleshoot a friend’s network at the moment. I can set -c 9223372036854775807 I suppose, but I don’t want to do this, I want ping to run until I tell it to stop.

2

That’s odd. The ping I get from iputils-20221126 out of the nixos-23.11 channel doesn’t stop after 5. Where is your ping coming from?

3

Same here, what is the output of:

realpath -- $(which ping)
ping -V
alias ping
type ping

On my system:

❯ realpath -- $(which ping)
/nix/store/cmfkl75kfv7337lm0m036hcqpqv0wrwz-iputils-20221126/bin/ping
❯ ping -V
ping from iputils 20221126
libcap: yes, IDN: yes, NLS: yes, error.h: yes, getrandom(): yes, __fpending(): yes
❯ alias ping
 ~ │ ✘ 1
❯ type ping
ping is /run/current-system/sw/bin/ping
4

You can likely use type -a ping to see the full sequence of potential resolutions.

5

What in the hell, it’s aliased to -c 5

> alias ping
ping='ping -c 5'

> type ping
ping is an alias for ping -c 5

> ping -V
ping from iputils 20240117
libcap: yes, IDN: yes, NLS: yes, error.h: yes, getrandom(): yes, __fpending(): yes
6 
> unalias ping
alice@nixos:pts/0->/home/alice (0) 
> ping 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time=41.5 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time=28.3 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time=66.9 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=27.7 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=5 ttl=117 time=36.2 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6 ttl=117 time=34.2 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=7 ttl=117 time=25.0 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=8 ttl=117 time=25.3 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=9 ttl=117 time=29.6 ms

It comes back when I open a new shell session, so it must be a zsh theme I’ve installed or something. I didn’t even think about this, it’s not something I would ever want or do. Thanks so much for giving me the few commands necessary to figure it out.

7

To close the loop this was due to the omz 'systemadmin" plugin. This was included in my conf because I simply copied the zsh/omz config out of the wiki without reading the plugin contents. Always something to be wary of.