Introduction

This page describes the alpha software release for the bprobe and cprobe tools developed by members of the OCEANS research group at Boston University .

Background

The design and validation of these tools as well as applications are described in these papers.

Restrictions

Currently these tools rely on two features of the IRIX operating system for SGI hardware. First, the use of a high precision timer which provides finer granularity timing of the probe packets. Second the ability to change the priority of the process which also facilitates accurate timing. These requirements are further explained in the README file with the software distribution. If you port these tools to other systems we'd appreciate hearing from you.

Also, since the probes use the ICMP socket they must be run SUID root.

Software Availability

Basic Tools

The basic tools can be found in this tar file. Included in the archive is a README file with the installation procedures.

SONAR Implementation

We have also implemented these tools in the context of the proposed SONAR service. This provides a server that performs the probe and a client that initiates the probe and receives the results. This set-up obviates the need for the probe to be run SUID root by the client. The server still needs root privileges.

A tar archive for this version of the software is also available.

Contact address

Please send all comments, suggestions, bug fixes to carter@cs.bu.edu


Bob Carter - carter@cs.bu.edu