dbeacon(1)

💖 dbeacon(1) — the manual page bestie edition 💖

okay so you found dbeacon(1) in the General Commands Manual section and you're like "what is this" — don't worry, I got you. Let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

dbeacon — Distributed IPv4/IPv6 multicast beacon 🦋

✨ SYNOPSYS ✨

(yes bestie it's spelled like that in the original, I don't make the rules 💀)

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 ✨

okay so dbeacon is a network level management tool and its whole vibe is getting all kinds of statistics about multicast connectivity. lowkey iconic.

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. 👑

Those 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. it's giving "who am I on this network" 💅
• -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. 😭 (we've all been there)
• -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 deamon, 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). main character energy fr fr
• -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. 🦋✨

and that's the whole page bestie, no cap. go forth and beacon responsibly 💖

this one lives under the User Manuals source and it's filed as dbeacon(1) — iykyk 🫶🎀