Wiki Navigation

dbeacon, a Multicast Beacon

dbeacon is a Multicast Beacon written in C++. The main purpose of a beacon is to monitor other beacon's reachability and collect statistics such as loss, delay and jitter between beacons. dbeacon support both IPv4 and IPv6 multicast, collecting information using both Any Source Multicast (ASM) and Source-Specific Multicast (SSM).

For questions, bug reports and feature requests contact Hugo Santos (hugo {at} fivebits {dot} net).

After installing dbeacon, the following information might be useful:

While dbeacon was designed for long-term multicast connectivity monitoring, SSM Ping is a tool that complements it's use, as it allows quick connectivity checks to be performed. A SSM Ping server is included with dbeacon, and it's presence may be advertised in dbeacon reports, allowing other hosts to check their multicast connectivity towards your site.

A dbeacon port for Windows has been made by CNR IT, check their page for the binary and source.

dbeacon is free and open source. Please support the project by contributing.

Mailing list

The project mailing list is available at https://fivebits.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dbeacon.

Supported Platforms

dbeacon is supported on a wide range of POSIX-compatible platforms, from Linux to Solaris. It has been reported that dbeacon has been used in the following platforms:

Linux 2.4 to 2.6 -- x86, powerpc, mips (any distribution)
Mac OS X 10.3 and later -- powerpc and intel
Solaris 9 and later -- sparc
FreeBSD 5 and later -- x86

The fact that your platform is not listed doesn't mean dbeacon won't work. Download it and give it a go.

Changelog

0.3.9.1

Multiple fixes and suggestions by Faidon Liambotis, including debian integration
Make RRD usage in matrix.pl fully optional
Fixed a long standing issue where dbeacon would abort if it wasn't able to have a 10ms latency in the internal timers
Improvements and bug fixes suggested/reported by Patrick Koppen and Tor Gjerde
Fixes by Alexander Gall and Jon Kare Hellan
NetBSD support by Emmanuel Dreyfus

Source code

Current source release is dbeacon-0.3.9.1 (July 13th 2007).

To build dbeacon run the following commands:

$ tar zxf path/to/dbeacon-0.3.9.1.tar.gz
$ cd dbeacon-0.3.9.1
$ make

A dbeacon executable will then be available in the directory.

Please note that a C compiler (such as GCC) and GNU Make are required to build dbeacon. These are commonly available in your distribution.

Roadmap

0.4 - Work is currently under way for the next dbeacon release, 0.4.0. It will include:
- improved report generation by merging the matrix functionality with the dbeacon executable, allowing it to either periodicaly generate static html reports (such as webalizer) or serve reports directly using a simple internal http server
0.5 - The features planned for this future release include:
- tagging of collected information
- selected redistribution of tagged information (allow pure-servers and internal/external zones)
- the ability for nodes to use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) mechanisms (digital signatures) to validate the probes and reports, thus minimizing the possibility of impersonation attacks.

Recommendation

Due to the mechanisms used by dbeacon, for some of the reports it is required that all of the nodes participating be synchronized. This can be accomplished using NTPd, which is available in most systems.

Acknowledgments and Copyright

Ideas, code (IPv4 porting, etc) and testing also by Hoerdt Mickael (www).
Sebastien Chaumontet implemented the rrdtool-powered history back-end
Bernhard Schmidt provided valuable resources and also helped testing

Download in other formats:

Plain Text