[TriLUG] smokeping showing packet loss

[Alan Porter via TriLUG]

I have been seeing some weird graphs on smokeping at home.

Usually, I see a solid green line with a cloud of grey smoke
around it.  But ever since this summer, it's been showing
PURPLE lines with smoke.  The purple indicates a high level
of packet loss.

Below the graphs, I see some stats like "loss avg/max/min/now"
and they are all high, like 30% and higher.

ALL of the graphs are affected, INCLUDING the one for LOCALHOST!

Meanwhile, in practice, I don't think I really have that high
packet loss.  I can run fping with the same arguments that
smokeping uses, and I don't get lots of lost packets.

/usr/bin/fping -C 20 -q -B1 -r1 -i10 localhost other.hosts.too

What's special about this summer, when the change started?

I had some bad RAM on this machine and it kept crashing.  With
bad RAM, you know, all sorts of processes and files are
constantly getting shot full of holes, so I suspect everything.
After several weeks, I figured out the problem and replaced the
RAM and I probably did a prophylactic "apt-get upgrade" to
freshen up my packages.

Why would smokeping be reporting such high packet loss?

Alan