Ubuntu Manpage: echoping - tests a remote host with TCP or UDP

NAME

       echoping - tests a remote host with TCP or UDP

SYNOPSIS

       echoping  [-4]  [-6]  [-v]  [-V]  [-ffill]  [-ttimeout] [-c] [-d] [-u] [-ssize] [-nnumber]
       [-wdelay] [-hurl-or-path] [-R] [-iurl] [-ppriority] [-Ptos] [-C] [-S] [-A] [-a] [-mplugin]
       hostname [:port] [plugin options...]

DESCRIPTION

       echoping  is  a  small program to test (approximatively) performances of a remote Internet
       host by sending it TCP "echo" packets. It can use other protocols as well  (HTTP  -  which
       makes it a good tool to test Web servers, UDP "echo", etc).

       echoping  simply  shows  the elapsed time, including the time to set up the TCP connection
       and to transfer the data. Therefore, it is unsuitable  to  physical  line  raw  throughput
       measures  (unlike bing or treno). On the other end, the action it performs are close from,
       for instance, a HTTP request and it is meaningful to use it  (carefully)  to  measure  Web
       performances.

ARGUMENT

       hostname[:port]
              Name  (or  address) of the server to test. For HTTP, you can specify a port number.
              For HTTP and IPv6, you can use RFC 2732 syntax (you will probably  need  to  escape
              the brackets from the shell). The name can be an IDN (Unicode domain name).

OPTIONS

-v Verbose

-V Displays the compiled-in configuration of echoping. Useful for bug reports.

-s nnn Size of the data to send. Large values can produce strange results with some echo
servers.

-n nnn Numbers of repeated tests. With this option, you have also the minimum, maximum,
average and median time, as well as the standard deviation. The median is the value
such that half of the measures are under it and the other half is above. When you
measure highly variables values, like it is often the case on the whole Internet,
median is better than average to avoid "extreme" values. You can check the "value"
of the average by looking at the standard deviation: very roughly, if the standard
deviation is more than the half of the average, the average does not mean anything.
(See a book about statistics for the details: the reality is far more complicated.)

-w nnn Number of seconds to wait between two tests (default is one). On systems which have
usleep(), you can write it as a fractional number, such as 3.14. Otherwise, use
integers.

-t nnn Number of seconds to wait a reply before giving up. For TCP, this is the maximum
number of seconds for the whole connection (setup and data exchange).

-u Use UDP instead of TCP

-d Use the "discard" service instead of echo

-c Use the "chargen" service instead of echo

-h url-or-path
Use the HTTP protocol (instead of echo) for the given URL. If the hostname is the
Web server, the argument has to be a path, a relative URL (for instance '/' or
'/pics/foobar.gif'). If the hostname is a proxy/cache like Squid, the argument has
to be an absolute URL.

-R Accept HTTP status codes 3xx (redirections) as normal responses (the default is to
regard them as errors)

-i url Use the ICP protocol (instead of echo) for the given URL. The URL has to be an
absolute one. This is mostly for testing Squid Web proxy/caches.

-A Force the proxy (if you use one) to ignore the cache

-a Force the proxy (if you use one) to revalidate data with the original server

-C Use the SSL/TLS (cryptography) protocol. For HTTP tests only.

-S Use the SMTP protocol (instead of echo) for the given server.

-4 Use only IPv4 (even if the target machine has an IPv6 address)

-6 Use only IPv6 (even if the target machine has an IPv4 address)

-f character
Fill the packet with this character (default is random filling)

-D Tries to display actual data transfer duration only, not total time

-N n Displays an average which excludes values ("outliers") which are further than +/-
N*standard deviation

-p n Send packets with the socket priority to the integer n. The mapping of the socket
priority into a network layer or a link layer priority depends upon the network
protocol and link protocol in use. For more details see SO_PRIORITY in socket(7).

-P n Set the IP type of service octet in the transmitted packets to the least
significant eight bits of the integer n. See ip(7) or ip(4) (depending on your
Unix). /usr/include/netinet/ip.h may contain interesting constants for setting Type
Of Service.

-m plugin
Load the given plugin. The plugin is first searched in the normal library
directories (see ld.so(8) ) then in /usr/lib/echoping. You can type ls in
/usr/lib/echoping to get an idea of the available plugins. The documentation for a
given plugin is in echoping_PLUGINNAME(1) The plugin-specific options appear after
the hostname.

EXAMPLES

       echoping -v foobar.example.com
              Tests the remote machine with TCP echo (one test).

       echoping -n 5 -w 10 foobar.example.com
              Tests the remote machine with TCP echo (five tests, every ten seconds).

       echoping -h / foobar.example.com
              Tests  the  remote  Web  server and asks its home page. Note you don't indicate the
              whole URL.

       echoping -h http://www.example.com/ cache.example.com:3128
              Tests the remote Web proxy-cache and asks a Web page. Note that you  must  indicate
              the whole URL.

       echoping -n 3 -m whois foobar.example.com -d tao.example.org
              Loads  the whois plugin and query the host foobar.example.com. "-d tao.example.org"
              are options specific to the whois plugin.

       echoping -u -P 0xa0 foobar.example.com
              Sends several UDP Echo packets with an IP Precedence of 5.

IP TYPE OF SERVICE OCTET

The IP packet header contains 8 bits named the "type of service octet". The value of the
octet is set with the -P option. The effects of the octet are defined differently in
RFC791 Internet Protocol and RFC2474 Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS
Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers.

RFC791 defines Precedence which has ascending priorities 0 through to 7, and the bits
Delay, Throughput, Reliability, and Cost which indicates the application's preference for
the properties of the packet's path through the network. Precedence is in the most
significant three bits of the type of service octet, followed in decending significance
order by the D, T, R and C bits. The least significant bit must be zero. Only one of the
D, T, R or C bits may be set.

RFC2474 defines the Distributed Services Code Point, or DSCP. This acts as a selector
between 64 possible behaviours that the network can apply to the packet. The DSCP is in
the most significant six bits of the type of service octet. The remaining least
significant two bits of the octet must be zero.

The numeric arguments to -p and -P can be in decimal (such as 11), octal (such as 013) or
hexadecimal (such as 0x0b). So padding decimal arguments with leading zeros will change
the value read.

You may need to be superuser to set some -p or -P values (precedence on Linux, for
instance).

BUGS

       See           SourceForge           bug           tracking            system            at
       <http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=4581&atid=104581>.

FILES

       /usr/lib/echoping
           Plugins directory

AUTHOR

       Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortz@users.sourceforge.net>