doc/iputils.db

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<article id="iputils">
 <artheader>
  <title>iputils: documentation directory</title>
 </artheader>

<sect1>
<title>Index</title>

<itemizedlist>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="ping.html">ping, ping6</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="arping.html">arping</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="clockdiff.html">clockdiff</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="rarpd.html">rarpd</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="tracepath.html">tracepath, tracepath6</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="traceroute6.html">traceroute6</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="rdisc.html">rdisc</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="tftpd.html">tftpd</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
  <ulink url="pg3.html">pg3, ipg, pgset</ulink>.
 </para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</sect1>

<sect1>
<title>Historical notes</title>

<para>
This package appeared as a desperate attempt to bring some life
to state of basic networking applets: <command/ping/, <command/traceroute/
etc. Though it was known that port of BSD <command/ping/ to Linux
was basically broken, neither maintainers of well known (and superb)
Linux net-tools package nor maintainers of Linux distributions
worried about fixing well known bugs, which were reported in linux-kernel
and linux-net mail lists for ages, were identified and nevertheless
not repaired. So, one day 1001th resuming of the subject happened
to be the last straw to break camel's back, I just parsed my hard disks
and collected a set of utilities, which shared the following properties:
</para>

<itemizedlist>
 <listitem><para>
Small
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
Useful despite of this
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
I never seen it was made right
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
Not quite trivial
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
Demonstrating some important feature of Linux 
 </para></listitem>
 <listitem><para>
The last but not the least, I use it more or less regularly
 </para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<para>
This utility set was not supposed to be a reference set or something like
that. Most of them were cloned from some originals:
<informaltable>
 <tgroup cols=2><tbody>
 <row>
  <entry>ping</entry>
  <entry>cloned of an ancient NetTools-B-xx</entry>
 </row>
 <row>
  <entry>ping6</entry>
  <entry>cloned of a very old Pedro's utility set</entry>
 </row>
 <row>
  <entry>traceroute6</entry>
  <entry>cloned of NRL Sep 96 distribution</entry>
 </row>
 <row>
  <entry>rdisc</entry>
  <entry>cloned of SUN in.rdisc</entry>
 </row>
 <row>
  <entry>clockdiff</entry>
  <entry>broken out of some BSD timed</entry>
 </row>
 <row>
  <entry>tftpd</entry>
  <entry>it is clone of some ancient NetKit package</entry>
 </row>
 </tbody></tgroup>
</informaltable>
</para>

<para>
Also I added some utilities written from scratch, namely
<command/tracepath/, <command/arping/ and later <command/rarpd/
(the last one does not satisfy all the criteria, I used it two or three
times).
</para>

<para>
Hesitated a bit I overcame temptation to add <command/traceroute/.
The variant released by LBNL to that time was mostly sane and bugs
in it were mostly not specific to Linux, but main reason was that
the latest version of LBNL <command/traceroute/ was not 
<emphasis/small/, it consisted of several files,
used a wicked (and failing with Linux :-)) autoconfiguration etc.
So, instead I assembled to iputils a simplistic <command/tracepath/ utility
and IPv6 version of traceroute, and published my 
<ulink url="ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/lbl-tools"> patches</ulink>.
to LBNL <command/traceroute/ separately.<footnote><para>This was mistake.
Due to this <command/traceroute/ was in a sad state until recently.
Good news, redhat-7.2 seems to add these patches to their traceroute
rpm eventually. So, I think I will refrain of suicide for awhile.
</para></footnote>
</para>

</sect1>

<sect1>
<title>Installation notes</title>
<para>
<userinput/make/ to compile utilities. <userinput/make html/ to prepare
html documentation, <userinput/make man/ if you prefer man pages.
Nothing fancy, provided you have DocBook package installed.
</para>

<para>
<userinput/make install/ installs <emphasis/only/ HTML documentation
to <filename>/usr/doc/iputils</filename>. It even does not try
to install binaries and man pages. If you read historical
notes above, the reason should be evident. Most of utilities
intersect with utilities distributed in another packages, and
making such target rewriting existing installation would be a crime
from my side. The decision what variant of <command/ping/ is preferred,
how to resolve the conflicts etc. is left to you or to person who
assembled an rpm. I vote for variant from <command/iputils/ of course.
</para>

<para>
Anyway, select utilities which you like and install them to the places
which you prefer together with their man pages.
</para>


<para>
It is possible that compilation will fail, if you use some
funny Linux distribution mangling header files in some unexpected ways
(expected ones are the ways of redhat of course :-)).
I validate iputils against <ulink url="http://www.asplinux.ru">asplinux</ulink>
distribution, which is inevitably followed by validity with respect
to <ulink url="http://www.redhat.com">redhat</ulink>.
If your distribution is one of widely known ones, suse or debian,
it also will compile provided snapshot is elder than month or so and
someone reported all the problems, if they took place at all.
</para>

<para>
<emphasis>
Anyway, please, do not abuse me complaining about some compilation problems
in any distribution different of asplinux or redhat.
If you have a fix, please, send it to
<ulink url="mailto:kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru">me</ulink>,
I will check that it does not break distributions mentioned above
and apply it. But I am not going to undertake any investigations,
bare reports are deemed to be routed to <filename>/dev/null</filename>.
</emphasis>
</para>

</sect1>

<sect1><title>Availability</title>

<para>
The collection of documents is part of <filename/iputils/ package
and the latest versions are  available in source form at
<ulink url="http://www.skbuff.net/iputils/iputils-current.tar.bz2">
http://www.skbuff.net/iputils/iputils-current.tar.bz2</ulink>.
</para>
</sect1>


<sect1>
<title>Copying</title>
<para>
Different files are copyrighted by different persons and organizations
and distributed under different licenses. For details look into corresponding
source files.
</para>
</sect1>

</article>