After setting up Smokeping + nginx with fcgiwrap I also added TCPPing and while it worked on a different instance, this time it would just output blank lines at one second intervals.  Since a search didn’t turn up the results, I figured I would throw together this post to give the Internet some more search fodder in case someone else runs into this.

TL;DR: Install tcptraceroute

This post was what actually solved my issue, specifically the section at the bottom:

>To make things a bit more confusing, there are various symlinks 
>(including /etc/alternatives/tcptraceroute) and shell scripts
>to offer compatible command line interfaces.
>
>In your case, just installing the `tcptraceroute' package should do

It seems that at least on Ubuntu based systems, /usr/sbin/tcptraceroute is not the tcptraceroute that TCPPing expects and causes this behavior.

It’s regrettable that TCPPing isn’t more than just a quick script thrown together because then it would hopefully be able to throw a meaningful error message but such is the price of free.