Wednesday, December 10, 2008

More Tools

Always impressed with a good tool, I've just learned about tcptrace; the homepage is here. It can take a tcpdump dump and generate basically any graph or statistic you could possibly want; throughput, data-in-flight, time-sequence number plots, etc. It outputs graphs in xplot format. A word of warning; the debian package version of tcptrace worked fine for me but the debian version of xplot wouldn't accept its output; maybe there's a version mismatch. I'm not actually sure the debian xplot is the same xplot that tcptrace expects. Building xplot from source fixed the problem.

Also of interest is xpl2gpl, which can convert the xplot files to gnuplot files, if that's your thing. It seemed to work okay...