Ping using SIP OPTIONS

One of my SIP providers is dropping support for ICMP and instead says their customers will need to use SIP OPTIONS pings.

Is SIP OPTIONS supported by PingPlotter? If so, where is it configured?

Hi, Marc.

This is possible, using the UDP Packet types that were introduced quietly in Version 3.20. There are some caveats:

* Requires UDP raw sockets - which works find in Windows XP, but under Vista/Win 7, intermediate TTL expired replies are quietly dropped by Windows, so intermediate hops won't show up on those OSes.
* If a packet is dropped, a warning message is displayed above the trace graph, "Response from instead of (server)". This message doesn't mean anything, but gets updated every lost packet.
* SIP OPTION packets are low priority on most servers, so it may not get a speedy reply. To an no-load local asterisk server here, we regularly see 30ms variations in reply time. Fair warning, I guess.

I've attached a packet format - download it and unzip it into your \Program Files\PingPlotter\UDPPacketTypes directory. Close / restart PingPlotter. Go change your packet type to UDP, then pick the "Fixed target port" type, then pick "SIP Options Ping". Try it out.

I've only tested this against Asterisk - and under Asterisk, the IAX ping might actually be a better choice, since it's sessionless request.

Please let us know if this works for you.

- Pete