pld.tcl

Description

pld.tcl (Packet Loss Daemon)  is a little utility for tracking the robustness of a network connection.  It outputs a set of HTML pages with embedded graphics that show the uptime of a connection to a particular host.

Screen Shots

There is no graphical user interface for pld.tcl, but you can view a sample of its output here.

Usage

There is no graphical user interface for pld.tcl, the good stuff is an in the command line argument section.

pld.tcl is intended to run forever... in a daemon-like fashion.  Just run it and let it do its work.

pld.tcl outputs several files:

index.html	The main output file... shows stats for all stats pld.tcl has collected in current working directory.
today.html	A page that always shows the stats for today.
pld*.html	A page for each day that pld.tcl has been running.
.img/*.gif	An image for stats for each day that pld.tcl has been running.

The image for each day can be decoded in the following way:

• A vertical line of all green means the sample was 100% successful
• A vertical line of all red means the sample was 0% successful
• A vertical line of blue means there was no sample for this time period
• A line of some green and some red means the sample was some percentage successful, with more green representing higher success rate.

Command Line Args

<host name>	The only command line arg... the host name to do the ping tests to.

Key Bindings

There are no key bindings for pld.tcl.

Requirements

• The tcl.prehiti.net libraries
• Tcl/Tk 8.2 or greater
• IncrTcl 3.0 or greater
• The image extension to Tcl/Tk
• A ping executable in your path with the kind of output pld.tcl expects (pld.tcl searches for the regular expression "\d+?%" to find a number representing packet loss percentage)

Todo List
 

Bugs

General

• Integrate pld.tcl and plp.tcl so pld.tcl has the same stats as plp.tcl without the need for a post-process of the pld.tcl output.
• Expose more of the internal configuration parameters to the command line.
• Using any of the image routines in Tcl/Tk requires Tk, which in turns requires a connection to an X-server in order to work.