1 <!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN"[]> 2 <article id="iputils"> 3 <artheader> 4 <title>iputils: documentation directory</title> 5 </artheader> 6 7 <sect1> 8 <title>Index</title> 9 10 <itemizedlist> 11 <listitem><para> 12 <ulink url="ping.html">ping, ping6</ulink>. 13 </para></listitem> 14 <listitem><para> 15 <ulink url="arping.html">arping</ulink>. 16 </para></listitem> 17 <listitem><para> 18 <ulink url="clockdiff.html">clockdiff</ulink>. 19 </para></listitem> 20 <listitem><para> 21 <ulink url="rarpd.html">rarpd</ulink>. 22 </para></listitem> 23 <listitem><para> 24 <ulink url="tracepath.html">tracepath, tracepath6</ulink>. 25 </para></listitem> 26 <listitem><para> 27 <ulink url="traceroute6.html">traceroute6</ulink>. 28 </para></listitem> 29 <listitem><para> 30 <ulink url="rdisc.html">rdisc</ulink>. 31 </para></listitem> 32 <listitem><para> 33 <ulink url="tftpd.html">tftpd</ulink>. 34 </para></listitem> 35 <listitem><para> 36 <ulink url="pg3.html">pg3, ipg, pgset</ulink>. 37 </para></listitem> 38 </itemizedlist> 39 </sect1> 40 41 <sect1> 42 <title>Historical notes</title> 43 44 <para> 45 This package appeared as a desperate attempt to bring some life 46 to state of basic networking applets: <command/ping/, <command/traceroute/ 47 etc. Though it was known that port of BSD <command/ping/ to Linux 48 was basically broken, neither maintainers of well known (and superb) 49 Linux net-tools package nor maintainers of Linux distributions 50 worried about fixing well known bugs, which were reported in linux-kernel 51 and linux-net mail lists for ages, were identified and nevertheless 52 not repaired. So, one day 1001th resuming of the subject happened 53 to be the last straw to break camel's back, I just parsed my hard disks 54 and collected a set of utilities, which shared the following properties: 55 56 5758 77 7861 59 Small 60 64 62 Useful despite of this 63 67 65 I never seen it was made right 66 70 68 Not quite trivial 69 73 71 Demonstrating some important feature of Linux 72 76 74 The last but not the least, I use it more or less regularly 75 79 This utility set was not supposed to be a reference set or something like 80 that. Most of them were cloned from some originals: 81 82 83 84
87ping 85cloned of an ancient NetTools-B-xx 8688
ping6 89cloned of a very old Pedro's utility set</entry> 90 </row> 91 <row> 92 <entry>traceroute6</entry> 93 <entry>cloned of NRL Sep 96 distribution</entry> 94 </row> 95 <row> 96 <entry>rdisc</entry> 97 <entry>cloned of SUN in.rdisc</entry> 98 </row> 99 <row> 100 <entry>clockdiff</entry> 101 <entry>broken out of some BSD timed</entry> 102 </row> 103 <row> 104 <entry>tftpd</entry> 105 <entry>it is clone of some ancient NetKit package</entry> 106 </row> 107 </tbody></tgroup> 108 </informaltable> 109 </para> 110 111 <para> 112 Also I added some utilities written from scratch, namely 113 <command/tracepath/, <command/arping/ and later <command/rarpd/ 114 (the last one does not satisfy all the criteria, I used it two or three 115 times). 116 </para> 117 118 <para> 119 Hesitated a bit I overcame temptation to add <command/traceroute/. 120 The variant released by LBNL to that time was mostly sane and bugs 121 in it were mostly not specific to Linux, but main reason was that 122 the latest version of LBNL <command/traceroute/ was not 123 <emphasis/small/, it consisted of several files, 124 used a wicked (and failing with Linux :-)) autoconfiguration etc. 125 So, instead I assembled to iputils a simplistic <command/tracepath/ utility 126 and IPv6 version of traceroute, and published my 127 <ulink url="ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/lbl-tools"> patches</ulink>. 128 to LBNL <command/traceroute/ separately.<footnote><para>This was mistake. 129 Due to this <command/traceroute/ was in a sad state until recently. 130 Good news, redhat-7.2 seems to add these patches to their traceroute 131 rpm eventually. So, I think I will refrain of suicide for awhile. 132 </para></footnote> 133 </para> 134 135 </sect1> 136 137 <sect1> 138 <title>Installation notes</title> 139 <para> 140 <userinput/make/ to compile utilities. <userinput/make html/ to prepare 141 html documentation, <userinput/make man/ if you prefer man pages. 142 Nothing fancy, provided you have DocBook package installed. 143 </para> 144 145 <para> 146 <userinput/make install/ installs <emphasis/only/ HTML documentation 147 to <filename>/usr/doc/iputils</filename>. It even does not try 148 to install binaries and man pages. If you read historical 149 notes above, the reason should be evident. Most of utilities 150 intersect with utilities distributed in another packages, and 151 making such target rewriting existing installation would be a crime 152 from my side. The decision what variant of <command/ping/ is preferred, 153 how to resolve the conflicts etc. is left to you or to person who 154 assembled an rpm. I vote for variant from <command/iputils/ of course. 155 </para> 156 157 <para> 158 Anyway, select utilities which you like and install them to the places 159 which you prefer together with their man pages. 160 </para> 161 162 163 <para> 164 It is possible that compilation will fail, if you use some 165 funny Linux distribution mangling header files in some unexpected ways 166 (expected ones are the ways of redhat of course :-)). 167 I validate iputils against <ulink url="http://www.asplinux.ru">asplinux</ulink> 168 distribution, which is inevitably followed by validity with respect 169 to <ulink url="http://www.redhat.com">redhat</ulink>. 170 If your distribution is one of widely known ones, suse or debian, 171 it also will compile provided snapshot is elder than month or so and 172 someone reported all the problems, if they took place at all. 173 </para> 174 175 <para> 176 <emphasis> 177 Anyway, please, do not abuse me complaining about some compilation problems 178 in any distribution different of asplinux or redhat. 179 If you have a fix, please, send it to 180 <ulink url="mailto:kuznet (a] ms2.inr.ac.ru">me</ulink>, 181 I will check that it does not break distributions mentioned above 182 and apply it. But I am not going to undertake any investigations, 183 bare reports are deemed to be routed to <filename>/dev/null</filename>. 184 </emphasis> 185 </para> 186 187 </sect1> 188 189 <sect1><title>Availability</title> 190 191 <para> 192 The collection of documents is part of <filename/iputils/ package 193 and the latest versions are available in source form at 194 <ulink url="http://www.skbuff.net/iputils/iputils-current.tar.bz2"> 195 http://www.skbuff.net/iputils/iputils-current.tar.bz2</ulink>. 196 </para> 197 </sect1> 198 199 200 <sect1> 201 <title>Copying</title> 202 <para> 203 Different files are copyrighted by different persons and organizations 204 and distributed under different licenses. For details look into corresponding 205 source files. 206 </para> 207 </sect1> 208 209 </article> 210
