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  deamon,
              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)