NAME
dbeacon - Distributed IPv4/IPv6 multicast beacon
SYNOPSYS
dbeacon -a MAIL -b BEACON_ADDR[/PORT] [-i INTFNAME] [-n NAME] [-S
[GROUP_ADDR[/PORT]] [-s ADDR] [-d [FILE]] [-I NUMBER] [-W type$url] [-L
program] [-C CC] [-4] [-6] [-v] [-P] [-U] [-V] [-F flag] [-O] [-B ADDR]
DESCRIPTION
dbeacon is a network level management tool aiming at getting various
statistics about multicast connectivity. Its first usage is to check
out if you can send/receive toward/from an IPv4/IPv6 multicast network.
Its second usage is to gather various statistics by using a known
multicast ASM group, for example TTL between each multicast peers, loss
or jitter figures. Theses statistics are kept internally but can be
dumped periodically in a file in xml format for latter processing.
Statistics gathering is completetly distributed and rely on the
powerful nature of ASM. No server is required, but maybe a http server
for accessing the statistics and build an adjacency matrix of the
peers.
OPTIONS
-n NAME, -name NAME
The name identifying you on the dbeacon session. If not
specified, dbeacon will use the hostname of the running machine.
-a MAIL
Administrative contact. This is an e-mail used for join you, for
example to notify you that something is wrong is your multicast
connectivity
-i IN, -interface IN
Use IN instead of the default interface for multicast.
-b BEACON_ADDR/PORT
This is the IPv4/IPv6 address of the ASM group used by dbeacon
to gather statistics. It can be specified as a DNS name too.
-S GROUP_ADDR/PORT
Enables SSM reception/sending on optional GROUP_ADDR/PORT
-O This option enable SSM data sending in addition to ASM data. It
can be used to check if people can reach you via SSM.
-B ADDR
This allows you to bootstrap from an ADDR that is already in the
matrix. This option is useful when you ASM connectivity is
broken but SSM connectivity works.
-P, -ssmping
Enable SSM Ping server capability.
-s ADDR
Bind to local address. This allow you to specify the multicast
source of the packets sent by your beacon.
-d FILE
Dump periodic reports to dump.xml or specified file. This file
may be latter processed by any XML compliant script. On a http
server, you can process the dump to create a nice adjacency
matrix.
-I NUMBER, -interval NUMBER
Interval between refresh of the dump file. Defaults to 5 secs if
not specified
-W URL, -website URL
Specify a website to announce.
-Wm URL, -matrix URL
Specify your matrix URL.
-Wl URL, -lg URL
Specify your looking glass URL.
-C CC Specify your two letter Country Code.
-L program
Launch program after each dump. The first argument will be the
dump filename.
-F flag
Specify a flag to announce. For example to announce that your
host is running a ssmpingd daemon, use ‘ssmping’ as a flag.
-4, -ipv4
Force IPv4 usage (Default is IPv6).
-6, -ipv6
Force IPv6 usage
-v verbose mode (use several for more verbosity)
-U Dump periodic bandwidth usage reports to stdout
-D, -daemon
fork to the background (daemonize)
-pidfile FILE
Path to the PID file to write to.
-syslog
Outputs using syslog facility.
-c FILE
Specifies the configuration file to use. Each of the above
command-line parameters can be defined there.
-V, -version
Outputs version information and leaves
BUGS
Should be reported to the core developer Hugo Santos
<hugo@fivebits.net>.
HISTORY
dbeacon is a joint work of Hugo Santos, Sebastien Chaumontet and
Mickael Hoerdt. It has been done in the early days of the m6bone, when
nobody knew if the SPTs or RPTs were being used between hosts and also
to evaluate the performance and deployment of SSM.
User Manuals dbeacon(1)