===============
Obtaining ICPLD
===============

If you are running FreeBSD, icpld is available through the
porting system.

ICPLD is currently available from 
http://www.ibiblio.org/icpld/icpld-1.1.5.tar.bz2 .
It is also mirrored at http://www.northernmost.org/icpld/

ICPLD is mirrored at other locations, but for the 
latest official release, stick to one of the two above URLS. I strongly dislike
recieving e-mails concerning months old versions.

===============
What is ICPLD?
===============

ICPLD aka. Internet Connection Performance Logging Daemon (nifty name, huh?)
is a daemon which, by sending ICMP requests to an ip of your 
choice, controls whether your networking connection is up or not. As of version
0.6.0 ICPLD supports both IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
It will log any failed attempts to contact the peering
machine, and stamp a log as soon as a reply is received. 
It keeps track of when the connection was unavailable, as well as for how 
long. Both totally down, as well as at each occasion of interrupted connection.

=================
Installing ICPLD 
=================

See INSTALL

====================
Where will it work?
====================

ICPLD is known to build and function properly at the following OS's 
and platforms:

Linux
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
MacOSX

And probably most other somewhat normal UNIX like systems. 
You got it running on some alien OS? Contact me, I'd love to know.

================================
How to use ICPLD & How it works
================================

I wrote this program, due to issues with my ISP. It was during a period 
of time incredibly unstable, and didn't perform well at all. So before I 
called them up, I let ICPLD run a few days. Thanks to this information,
rather than "It goes down every now and then, and stays 
down for a while", they could see patterns, and solve the issue rather 
quickly. Well, to the topic; It's recommended to run ICPLD towards a 
host that's aware of this, as constant ICMP requests might be less 
appreciated by some administrators. This is when the -dinterval switch 
comes in handy, as you can use another interval for checking, once 
the connection is down. And when a working connection is 
detected, icpld will fall back to either the default interval, or 
the one specified with -interval. -dinterval should, however, NOT be 
lower than 3 seconds, as the timeout for two ICMP packets is ~3 
seconds. Setting dinterval lower, will spawn a pinging process, faster 
than the old one has been terminated.

When reading the following, note that IPv4 is the "normal" ip standard of today.
For you who is not in any way using IPv6, or even knowing what it is 
may completely disregard everything concerning this. Just read IPv4 as 'a normal ip' 
and you will be all right.

The normal way to use ICPLD for IPv4 without the configuration file is as follows:
icpld -ip ip.of.the.target -fbip ip.of.another.target

The equivalent use with IPv6 would be:
icpld -ip6 ip.of.the.target -fbip6 ip.of.another.target

(Note that all operations that is available with IPv4 is available
 with IPv6 as well, simply add '6' at the end of the option.
 For instance, if you want to specify another log file for the
 IPv6 monitoring, you add the -logfile6 switch. Alternatively
 you specify it in the config file with the logFile6= option. 
 See manpage for further information concerning the use of 
 different options)

This will fork icpld to the background, and send an ICMP request every 
10 seconds to ip.of.the.target. If a reply isn't received within an 
appropriate amount of time from either the ip or the fbip, the 
connection is considered broken and a stamp with the time and date is 
put in the log.

The log may be read by executing 
icpld -log
The log file is by default stored in ~/.icpld/log

Another example would be:
icpld -ip 192.168.0.1 -fbip 192.168.0.2 -ip6 ::1 -interval 15 -dinterval 5
Which would check if 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.2 is available every 
15 seconds. If they are considered down (doesn't reply), icpld will 
try every 5 seconds. It would perform the same operations with the IPv6 
ip, and would log to the same file (~/.icpld/log)

It is however recommended to use a configuration file since 
it saves a lot of time on regular usage.

Please note that the log will not be 100% accurate, due to 
timeout time and interval (the lower the interval, the higher accuracy 
you will obtain, as well as higher traffic). It is roughly a few 
seconds differing at each occasion. 

There are several other options available, please 
see 'icpld --help', or 'man icpld'  for further information on these.

==========================================
I have; found a bug, had an idea, a tips,
had enough of you and want to flame you.
==========================================

Feedback is always welcomed by most developers. 
Please see http://northernmost.org/new/contact.php

==========================
Release specific  comments
==========================

See NEWS

===========
Thanks to
===========

Jonas Olsson <[email protected]> for general ideas, testing, lending
me OpenBSD machines as well as writing the startup-script for 
the FreeBSD-port (found in contrib/ )

Martin Nilsson <[email protected]> for help with general ideas (and complaints :-)

Léon Keijser <[email protected]> for the code which counts the number of interruptions

Pete Wilson <[email protected]> for the code base thanks to which the -log option work as it does
(see src/displog.cpp footer and source comments for further info)

Elliott Lockwood <[email protected]> for the OpenBSD port

Hans Ulrich Niedermann <[email protected]> (#devtools on irc.freenode.net) for the tricky parts of 
configure.in

Tom Angle <[email protected]> for providing the slackware package 
(http://www.ibiblio.org/icpld/download/binaries/slackware)

Klaus-J. Luksch <[email protected]> for the init script for SuSe (found in contrib/ )
 
Anonymous and slightly excentric person for the contrib/icpld.initd script