# iputils: documentation directory

## 1. Index

- ping, ping6.

- arping.

- clockdiff.

- rarpd.

- tracepath, tracepath6.

- traceroute6.

- rdisc.

- tftpd.

- pg3, ipg, pgset.

## 2. Historical notes

This package appeared as a desperate attempt to bring some life to state of basic networking applets: ping, traceroute etc. Though it was known that port of BSD 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:

- Small

- Useful despite of this

- I never seen it was made right

- Not quite trivial

- Demonstrating some important feature of Linux

- The last but not the least, I use it more or less regularly

This utility set was not supposed to be a reference set or something like that. Most of them were cloned from some originals:

ping | cloned of an ancient NetTools-B-xx
ping6 | cloned of a very old Pedro's utility set
traceroute6 | cloned of NRL Sep 96 distribution
rdisc | cloned of SUN in.rdisc
clockdiff | broken out of some BSD timed
tftpd | it is clone of some ancient NetKit package

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

Hesitated a bit I overcame temptation to add 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 traceroute was not small, it consisted of several files, used a wicked (and failing with Linux :-)) autoconfiguration etc. So, instead I assembled to iputils a simplistic tracepath utility and IPv6 version of traceroute, and published my patches. to LBNL traceroute separately.[1]

## 3. Installation notes

`make` to compile utilities. `make html` to prepare html documentation, `make man` if you prefer man pages. Nothing fancy, provided you have DocBook package installed.

`make install` installs only HTML documentation to `/usr/doc/iputils`. 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 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 iputils of course.

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

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 asplinux distribution, which is inevitably followed by validity with respect to redhat. 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.

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 me, 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 `/dev/null`.

## 4. Availability

The collection of documents is part of `iputils` package and the latest versions are available in source form at http://www.skbuff.net/iputils/iputils-current.tar.bz2.

## 5. Copying

Different files are copyrighted by different persons and organizations and distributed under different licenses. For details look into corresponding source files.

### Notes

[1] | This was mistake. Due to this 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.