PChar 1.5 review

pchar is a tool to characterize the bandwidth, latency, and loss of links along an end-to-end path through the Internet

License: BSD License File size: 114K Developer: Bruce A. Mah

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pchar is a tool to characterize the bandwidth, latency, and loss of links along an end-to-end path through the Internet. It is based on the algorithms of the pathchar utility written by Van Jacobson, formerly of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories.

pchar is a reimplementation of the pathchar utility, written by Van Jacobson. Both programs attempt to characterize the bandwidth, latency, and loss of links along an end-to-end path through the Internet. pchar works in both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

As of pchar-1.5, the development stops.

pchar is written in C++. During various stages of development, the gcc-2.7.2.1, gcc-2.8.1, egcs-1.1.2, gcc-2.95, and gcc-3.4.2 compilers were used for building pchar. Some testing has also taken place with the Sun SparcWorks and IRIX MIPSpro C++ compilers.

pchar's IPv6 support was originally written for the KAME 19991018 snapshot for FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE. The KAME team has since tested it with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, for more recent versions of the KAME IPv6 stack and the integrated IPv6 stacks in FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. pchar has also been run successfully on the native IPv6 stack in Solaris 8.

What's New in This Release:
Source code moved from CVS to Subversion. Although generally not user-visible, the version control strings now use Subversion's format.
Builds on recent (RH 9.0-vintage) Linux systems seem to work now.

Some off-by-one errors have been fixed, based on patches submitted by Anil Madhavapeddy .

pchar with SNMP enabled now has at least a chance of working correctly.

pchar no longer incorrectly aborts after a hop with 100% packet loss.

pchar now does a better job of linking libraries using --with-snmp on machines where libsnmp depends on libcrypto, thanks to Matt Zimmerman .

Some problems using --with-pcap on RedHat 7.0/7.1 (possibly other Linux distributions as well) were found thanks to a debugging session with Fran Boon .