Obtaining ICPLD
If you are running FreeBSD, icpld is available through the porting system.
ICPLD is currently available from
http://www.ibiblio.org/icpld/icpld-1.1.4.tar.bz2 .
It is also mirrored at http://www.northernmost.org/icpld/
ICPLD is mirrored at other locations, but for the latest official release, stick to one of the two above URLS. I strongly dislike recieving e-mails concerning months old versions.
Once installed and tested, please fill out the icpld survey at http://www.ibiblio.org/icpld/feedback.html
What is ICPLD?
ICPLD aka. Internet Connection Performance Logging Daemon (nifty name, huh?) is a daemon which, by sending ICMP requests to an ip of your choice, controls whether your networking connection is up or not. As of version 0.6.0 ICPLD supports both IPv4 and IPv6 networks. It will log any failed attempts to contact the peering machine, and stamp a log as soon as a reply is received. It keeps track of when the connection was unavailable, as well as for how long. Both totally down, as well as at each occasion of interrupted connection.
Installing ICPLD
See INSTALL
Where will it work?
ICPLD is known to build and function properly at the following OS's and platforms:
Linux
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
MacOSX
And probably most other somewhat normal UNIX like systems. You got it running on some alien OS? Contact me, I'd love to know.
How to use ICPLD & How it works
I wrote this program, due to issues with my ISP. It was during a period of time incredibly unstable, and didn't perform well at all. So before I called them up, I let ICPLD run a few days. Thanks to this information, rather than "It goes down every now and then, and stays down for a while", they could see patterns, and solve the issue rather quickly. Well, to the topic; It's recommended to run ICPLD towards a host that's aware of this, as constant ICMP requests might be less appreciated by some administrators. This is when the -dinterval switch comes in handy, as you can use another interval for checking, once the connection is down. And when a working connection is detected, icpld will fall back to either the default interval, or the one specified with -interval. -dinterval should, however, NOT be lower than 3 seconds, as the timeout for two ICMP packets is ~3 seconds. Setting dinterval lower, will spawn a pinging process, faster than the old one has been terminated.
When reading the following, note that IPv4 is the "normal" ip standard of today. For you who is not in any way using IPv6, or even knowing what it is may completely disregard everything concerning this. Just read IPv4 as 'a normal ip' and you will be all right.
The normal way to use ICPLD for IPv4 without the configuration file is as follows: icpld -ip ip.of.the.target -fbip ip.of.another.target
The equivalent use with IPv6 would be:
icpld -ip6 ip.of.the.target -fbip6 ip.of.another.target
(Note that all operations that is available with IPv4 is available with IPv6 as well, simply add '6' at the end of the option. For instance, if you want to specify another log file for the IPv6 monitoring, you add the -logfile6 switch. Alternatively you specify it in the config file with the logFile6= option. See manpage for further information concerning the use of different options)
This will fork icpld to the background, and send an ICMP request every 10 seconds to ip.of.the.target. If a reply isn't received within an appropriate amount of time from either the ip or the fbip, the connection is considered broken and a stamp with the time and date is put in the log.
The log may be read by executing
icpld -log
The log file is by default stored in ~/.icpld/log
Another example would be:
icpld -ip 192.168.0.1 -fbip 192.168.0.2 -ip6 ::1 -interval 15 -dinterval 5
Which would check if 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 is available every
15 seconds. If they are considered down (doesn't reply), icpld will
try every 5 seconds. It would perform the same operations with the IPv6
ip, and would log to the same file (~/.icpld/log)
It is however recommended to use a configuration file since it saves a lot of time on regular usage.
Please note that the log will not be 100% accurate, due to timeout time and interval (the lower the interval, the higher accuracy you will obtain, as well as higher traffic). It is roughly a few seconds differing at each occasion.
There are several other options available, please see 'icpld --help', or 'man icpld' for further information on these.
I have; found a bug, had an idea, a tips, had enough of you and want to flame you.
Feedback is always welcomed by most developers.
Please see http://northernmost.org/~erik/contact.html before
sending me any emails what so ever.
Afterwards, feel free to mail me at on of the following addresses;
erik -[AT]- ibiblio -[DOT]- org <- Preferred
erilj023 -[AT]- student -[DOT]- liu -[DOT]- se <- Secondary
However, do NOT contact me if your issue involves any of the following;
- You are trying to compile ICPLD with an ancient GCC version such as 2.*.* or some weird compiler (except if you've succeeded)
- An administrator has confronted you for being naughty with constant ICMP requests
- You haven't even tried to solve the problem yourself
- If you haven't read this document first.
But please DO contact me if your issue involves any of the following:
- You want to hire me for a job (anything, programmer (not likely, huh?), bust-boy, driver, etc..)
- You want to give me your appreciations and/or thanks
- You got a cool idea that you would like to have implemented in the next version (or preferred, that YOU have implemented)
- You want to be a pre release tester.
- You want to provide me with a test-bed on some exciting OS/arch
Release specific comments
See NEWS
Thanks to
Jonas Olsson <impcat@fearmuffs.net> for general ideas, testing, lending me OpenBSD machines as well as writing the startup-script for the FreeBSD-port (found in contrib/ )
Martin Nilsson <orko@kladdkaka.nu> for help with general ideas (and complaints :-)
Léon Keijser <l.keijser@chello.nl> for the code which counts the number of interruptions
Pete Wilson <pete@pwilson.net> for the code base thanks to which the -log option work as it does (see src/displog.cpp footer and source comments for further info)
Elliott Lockwood <elliot_ca@hotmail.com> for the OpenBSD port
Hans Ulrich Niedermann <gp@n-dimensional.de> (#devtools on irc.freenode.net) for the tricky parts of configure.in
Tom Angle <tangle@hclg.org> for providing the slackware package (http://www.ibiblio.org/icpld/download/binaries/slackware)
Klaus-J. Luksch <cyberclaus@gmx.net> for the init script for SuSe (found in contrib/ )
Anonymous and slightly excentric person for the contrib/icpld.initd script