KDE network utilities

This documentation was written for knu version 0.1.1. Please make any comments to the author.

Table of contents:

Presentation

The KDE network utilities program allows you to make a ping, a traceroute or an host resolution without lauching a terminal emulator.

You choose which utility you want to run by selecting the corresponding tab. You give the parameters needed for it and then click on the "Go!" button (or hit return). While the command is running, you can stop it by pushing the "Stop" button.

A right mouse click on the output window opens a menu from which you can

The ping tab

A screen shot of the ping tab

What is it?

The ping(8) command send ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to network hosts to check for network reachability. A response from a host (or anything that have an IP address) says that this host is running at least a TCP/IP network stack and indicates that the network route to go to this host is opened. The ping tab allows the execution of the ping(8) command.

Description

Ping uses the ICMP protocol's mandatory ECHO_REQUEST datagram to elicit an ICMP ECHO_RESPONSE from a host or gateway. ECHO_REQUEST datagrams (``pings'') have an IP and ICMP header, followed by a struct timeval and then an arbitrary number of pad bytes used to fill out the packet.

When using ping for fault isolation, it should first be run on the local host, to verify that the local network interface is up and running. Then, hosts and gateways further and further away should be ``pinged''. Round-trip times and packet loss statistics are computed. If duplicate packets are received, they are not included in the packet loss calculation, although the round trip time of these packets is used in calculating the minimum/average/maximum round-trip time numbers. When the program is terminated, a brief summary is displayed. This program is intended for use in network testing, measurement and management. Because of the load it can impose on the network, it is unwise to use ping during normal operations or for too long.

The traceroute tab

A screen shot of the traceroute tab

What is it?

The traceroute(8) command print the route that packets take to network host. The traceroute tab allows the execution of the traceroute(8) command.

Description

The Internet is a large and complex aggregation of network hardware, connected together by gateways. Tracking the route one's packets follow (or finding the miscreant gateway that's discarding your packets) can be difficult. Traceroute utilizes the IP protocol time to live field and attempts to elicit an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each gateway along the path to some host.
Options:

This program attempts to trace the route an IP packet would follow to some internet host by launching UDP probe packets with a small ttl (time to live) then listening for an ICMP "time exceeded" reply from a gateway. We start our probes with a ttl of one and increase by one until we get an ICMP "port unreachable" (which means we got to "host") or hit a max (which defaults to 30 hops and can be changed with the Max number of hops option). Three probes are sent at each ttl setting and a line is printed showing the ttl, address of the gateway and round trip time of each probe. If the probe answers come from different gateways, the address of each responding system will be printed. If there is no response within a 3 sec. timeout interval, a "*" is printed for that probe.

We don't want the destination host to process the UDP probe packets so the destination port is set to an unlikely value.

This program is intended for use in network testing, measurement and management. It should be used primarily for manual fault isolation. Because of the load it could impose on the network, it is unwise to use traceroute during normal operations or for too long.

Traceroute's authors
Implemented by Van Jacobson from a suggestion by Steve Deering. Debugged by a cast of thousands with particularly cogent suggestions or fixes from C. Philip Wood, Tim Seaver and Ken Adelman.

The host resolution tab

A screen shot of the host resolution tab

What is it?

The host resolution tab allows the execution of the host(8) command. The host(8) command...

Description

In the next version...

Configuration

You can configure the pathname of the command used by KDE network utilities if you don't want the command found in the PATH variable to be used. In your file $KDEDIR/config/knurc or ~/.kde/config/knurc, add:
[traceroute]
path=/usr/sbin/traceroute
The group name in the config file is the tab name.

Authors

Bertrand Leconte <B.Leconte@mail.dotcom.fr>

class KProcess: Christian Czezatke <e9025461@student.tuwien.ac.at>
widget Hello: this is a part of a Qt 1.2 example (http://www.troll.no)
The documentation comes mainly from the Linux ping(8) and traceroute(8) man pages.

Copyright

This program is published under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.