Overview
Dbeacon is one of a number of tools to monitor multicast connectivity between different locations on the network. Multiple sites send and receive traffic on a particular multicast group address and the reception results at each participating site are displayed in a matrix on a web page, enabling convenient detection and confirmation of multicast connectivity problems. AARNet (Australian Academic Research Network) and APAG (Asia-Pacific Access Grid) both host web servers to display dbeacon multicast connectivity results and it is recommended that all Access Grid sites in the Asia Pacific region run dbeacon configured so as to be displayed on both AARNet and APAG dbeacon web pages.This page describes a number of installation scenarios together with run time configuration options to join the appropriate dbeacon multicast group.
Method
Where available, it is most convenient to install a binary package of dbeacon for the OS and distribution of interest, using the appropriate software repository. For more details of this method, see the distro specific pages for:Debian
Fedora
Slackware
Ubuntu
If no binary version is available for the system of interest, it will be necessary to download the source code, compile & install it and then configure it appropriately before running it. The most current stable release is version 0.3.9.3, which may be obtained via the project's svn repository with the following command:
svn co https://fivebits.net/svn/dbeacon/tags/dbeacon-0.3.9.3 dbeacon-0.3.9.3
which will create a new dbeacon-0.3.9.3 directory containing the source code. A tarball is also available from:
http://www.vislab.uq.edu.au/ag3/distfiles/dbeacon-0.3.9.3.tar.gz
After building & installation, it is recommended to have dbeacon running whenever the machine is running i.e. it should start up as a service when the machine boots.
When running, the behaviour of dbeacon is conrolled by a configuration file, /etc/dbeacon/dbeacon.conf. To use the AARNet and APAG dbeacon, enter values as follows into the dbeacon.conf file:
name: any (short) name by which your beacon will be labelled in the web display
addr: 233.29.151.44
contact: a valid email address
CC: a country code e.g. AU, EU, JP, NZ, US etc. For more country codes, see the ISO listing.
Here is an example only for the mythical University of Tamworth:
name: UTamworth
addr: 233.29.151.44
contact: c.willing@uot.edu.au
CC: AU
When configuration is complete start dbeacon as indicated at the
distribution specific links above.