Subject: [ippm] pchar-1.3 available

From: [email-masked] (Bruce A. Mah)
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 10:10:58 -0800

Hi ippm-ers--

I apologize if this message isn't exactly working group business, but 
some of you may be interested to know that....

I'm most pleased to announce the release of pchar-1.3, a utility for
characterizing the individual links along a path between two network
hosts.

pchar has been tested on various versions of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
Linux, Solaris, OSF/1, and IRIX, with the primary development on
FreeBSD and Solaris.  pchar is written is C++, primarily using recent
versions of gcc, but with some testing also on the SparcWorks C++
compiler.  pchar supports IPv4 and, where applicable, IPv6.

Recent additions to pchar include: New analysis algorithms based on
the least median of squares linear fit method, new probe types (ICMP
and ICMPv6), the ability to set the outgoing interface of probes, and
a new "tiny traceroute" mode.  A number of bugs have been fixed as
well; most notably, IPv6 probes will now return (more) correct values
for the last hop of a path.  The CHANGES file included in the pchar
distribution provides more details.

The file format used for tracefiles has changed, unfortunately in an
incompatable way.  Files from pchar-1.2 and earlier are incompatible
with pchar-1.3 and vice versa.  Conversion between file formats is a
possibility, but has not been implemented yet.

More information, as well as downloadable source code, can be found at:

http://www.employees.org/~bmah/Software/pchar/

Questions and comments are welcome, and can be emailed to
<[email-masked]> or <[email-masked]>.