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)