ping is giving strange message !!!

[haneo]

Some times whene i send a ping request i get this line:
"Warning: time of day goes back, taking countermeasures."

What this meen ????

here a copy of the output:

[root@MyPC/]# ping

http://www.coucou.com

PING

http://www.coucou.com

(193.194.XXX.XXX) from 192.168.1.122 : 56(84) bytes of data.
Warning: time of day goes back, taking countermeasures.
64 bytes from

http://www.eldjazair.xxx.xxx

(193.194.XXX.XXX): icmp_seq=0 ttl=126 time=813 usec
64 bytes from

http://www.eldjazair.xxx.xxx

(193.194.XXX.XXX): icmp_seq=1 ttl=126 time=939 usec
64 bytes from

http://www.eldjazair.xxx.xxx

(193.194.XXX.XXX): icmp_seq=2 ttl=126 time=613 usec

---

http://www.wcoucou.com

ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/mdev = 0.613/0.788/0.939/0.136 ms

 

[KenCunningham]

Just a guess - are you pinging machines in different timezones to the one where the ping originates? Seems the most logical explanation, but who said things have to be logical! HTH.

 

[sleipnir214]

From what I've been able to piece together, it has to do with a newly implemented feature in ping and a change in ping's default behavior.

Apparently, ping used to issue "echo request" ICMP messages by default. Some time last year, support for "timestamp request" was added to ping, and that was made its default behavior.

When ping issues a "timestamp request" and gets a timestamp back it cannot use, it reverts to the older behavior and issues that warning.

One workaround is to use the "-U" option when using ping. That forces ping to use the old behavior. Another that might work is to install or update iputils.

Apparently, there were some minor incompatibilities with ping and either glibc or certain kernel revisions. Some people actually got your error pinging localhost.

Here is a link to a discussion of the problem on RedHat's bugzilla site:

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=37485