1<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN"[]>
2<article id="iputils">
3 <artheader>
4  <title>iputils: documentation directory</title>
5 </artheader>
6
7<sect1>
8<title>Index</title>
9
10<itemizedlist>
11 <listitem><para>
12  <ulink url="ping.html">ping, ping6</ulink>.
13 </para></listitem>
14 <listitem><para>
15  <ulink url="arping.html">arping</ulink>.
16 </para></listitem>
17 <listitem><para>
18  <ulink url="clockdiff.html">clockdiff</ulink>.
19 </para></listitem>
20 <listitem><para>
21  <ulink url="rarpd.html">rarpd</ulink>.
22 </para></listitem>
23 <listitem><para>
24  <ulink url="tracepath.html">tracepath, tracepath6</ulink>.
25 </para></listitem>
26 <listitem><para>
27  <ulink url="traceroute6.html">traceroute6</ulink>.
28 </para></listitem>
29 <listitem><para>
30  <ulink url="rdisc.html">rdisc</ulink>.
31 </para></listitem>
32 <listitem><para>
33  <ulink url="tftpd.html">tftpd</ulink>.
34 </para></listitem>
35 <listitem><para>
36  <ulink url="pg3.html">pg3, ipg, pgset</ulink>.
37 </para></listitem>
38 <listitem><para>
39  <ulink url="setkey.html">setkey</ulink>.
40 </para></listitem>
41</itemizedlist>
42</sect1>
43
44<sect1>
45<title>Historical notes</title>
46
47<para>
48This package appeared as a desperate attempt to bring some life
49to state of basic networking applets: <command/ping/, <command/traceroute/
50etc. Though it was known that port of BSD <command/ping/ to Linux
51was basically broken, neither maintainers of well known (and superb)
52Linux net-tools package nor maintainers of Linux distributions
53worried about fixing well known bugs, which were reported in linux-kernel
54and linux-net mail lists for ages, were identified and nevertheless
55not repaired. So, one day 1001th resuming of the subject happened
56to be the last straw to break camel's back, I just parsed my hard disks
57and collected a set of utilities, which shared the following properties:
58</para>
59
60<itemizedlist>
61 <listitem><para>
62Small
63 </para></listitem>
64 <listitem><para>
65Useful despite of this
66 </para></listitem>
67 <listitem><para>
68I never seen it was made right
69 </para></listitem>
70 <listitem><para>
71Not quite trivial
72 </para></listitem>
73 <listitem><para>
74Demonstrating some important feature of Linux 
75 </para></listitem>
76 <listitem><para>
77The last but not the least, I use it more or less regularly
78 </para></listitem>
79</itemizedlist>
80
81<para>
82This utility set was not supposed to be a reference set or something like
83that. Most of them were cloned from some originals:
84<informaltable>
85 <tgroup cols=2><tbody>
86 <row>
87  <entry>ping</entry>
88  <entry>cloned of an ancient NetTools-B-xx</entry>
89 </row>
90 <row>
91  <entry>ping6</entry>
92  <entry>cloned of a very old Pedro's utility set</entry>
93 </row>
94 <row>
95  <entry>traceroute6</entry>
96  <entry>cloned of NRL Sep 96 distribution</entry>
97 </row>
98 <row>
99  <entry>rdisc</entry>
100  <entry>cloned of SUN in.rdisc</entry>
101 </row>
102 <row>
103  <entry>clockdiff</entry>
104  <entry>broken out of some BSD timed</entry>
105 </row>
106 <row>
107  <entry>tftpd</entry>
108  <entry>it is clone of some ancient NetKit package</entry>
109 </row>
110 </tbody></tgroup>
111</informaltable>
112</para>
113
114<para>
115Also I added some utilities written from scratch, namely
116<command/tracepath/, <command/arping/ and later <command/rarpd/
117(the last one does not satisfy all the criteria, I used it two or three
118times).
119</para>
120
121<para>
122Hesitated a bit I overcame temptation to add <command/traceroute/.
123The variant released by LBNL to that time was mostly sane and bugs
124in it were mostly not specific to Linux, but main reason was that
125the latest version of LBNL <command/traceroute/ was not 
126<emphasis/small/, it consisted of several files,
127used a wicked (and failing with Linux :-)) autoconfiguration etc.
128So, instead I assembled to iputils a simplistic <command/tracepath/ utility
129and IPv6 version of traceroute, and published my 
130<ulink url="ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/lbl-tools"> patches</ulink>.
131to LBNL <command/traceroute/ separately.<footnote><para>This was mistake.
132Due to this <command/traceroute/ was in a sad state until recently.
133Good news, redhat-7.2 seems to add these patches to their traceroute
134rpm eventually. So, I think I will refrain of suicide for awhile.
135</para></footnote>
136</para>
137
138</sect1>
139
140<sect1>
141<title>Installation notes</title>
142<para>
143<userinput/make/ to compile utilities. <userinput/make html/ to prepare
144html documentation, <userinput/make man/ if you prefer man pages.
145Nothing fancy, provided you have DocBook package installed.
146</para>
147
148<para>
149<userinput/make install/ installs <emphasis/only/ HTML documentation
150to <filename>/usr/doc/iputils</filename>. It even does not try
151to install binaries and man pages. If you read historical
152notes above, the reason should be evident. Most of utilities
153intersect with utilities distributed in another packages, and
154making such target rewriting existing installation would be a crime
155from my side. The decision what variant of <command/ping/ is preferred,
156how to resolve the conflicts etc. is left to you or to person who
157assembled an rpm. I vote for variant from <command/iputils/ of course.
158</para>
159
160<para>
161Anyway, select utilities which you like and install them to the places
162which you prefer together with their man pages.
163</para>
164
165
166<para>
167It is possible that compilation will fail, if you use some
168funny Linux distribution mangling header files in some unexpected ways
169(expected ones are the ways of redhat of course :-)).
170I validate iputils against <ulink url="http://www.asplinux.ru">asplinux</ulink>
171distribution, which is inevitably followed by validity with respect
172to <ulink url="http://www.redhat.com">redhat</ulink>.
173If your distribution is one of widely known ones, suse or debian,
174it also will compile provided snapshot is elder than month or so and
175someone reported all the problems, if they took place at all.
176</para>
177
178<para>
179<emphasis>
180Anyway, please, do not abuse me complaining about some compilation problems
181in any distribution different of asplinux or redhat.
182If you have a fix, please, send it to
183<ulink url="mailto:kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru">me</ulink>,
184I will check that it does not break distributions mentioned above
185and apply it. But I am not going to undertake any investigations,
186bare reports are deemed to be routed to <filename>/dev/null</filename>.
187</emphasis>
188</para>
189
190</sect1>
191
192<sect1><title>Availability</title>
193
194<para>
195The collection of documents is part of <filename/iputils/ package
196and the latest versions are  available in source form for anonymous ftp
197<ulink url="ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/iputils-current.tar.gz">
198ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/iputils-current.tar.gz</ulink>.
199</para>
200</sect1>
201
202
203<sect1>
204<title>Copying</title>
205<para>
206Different files are copyrighted by different persons and organizations
207and distributed under different licenses. For details look into corresponding
208source files.
209</para>
210</sect1>
211
212</article>
213