Historical notes

This package appeared as a desperate attempt to bring some life to state of basic networking applets: ping, traceroute etc. Though it was known that port of BSD ping to Linux was basically broken, neither maintainers of well known (and superb) Linux net-tools package nor maintainers of Linux distributions worried about fixing well known bugs, which were reported in linux-kernel and linux-net mail lists for ages, were identified and nevertheless not repaired. So, one day 1001th resuming of the subject happened to be the last straw to break camel's back, I(Alexey Kuznetsov) just parsed my hard disks and collected a set of utilities, which shared the following properties:

• Small
• Useful despite of this
• I never seen it was made right
• Not quite trivial
• Demonstrating some important feature of Linux
• The last but not the least, I use it more or less regularly

This utility set was not supposed to be a reference set or something like that. Most of them were cloned from some originals:

   *  ping: cloned of an ancient NetTools-B-xx
   *  ping6: cloned of a very old Pedro's utility set
   *  traceroute6: cloned of NRL Sep 96 distribution
   *  rdisc: cloned of SUN in.rdisc
   *  clockdiff: broken out of some BSD timed
   *  tftpd: it is clone of some ancient NetKit package

Also I added some utilities written from scratch, namely tracepath, arping and later rarpd (the last one does not satisfy all the criteria, I used it two or three times).

Hesitated a bit I overcame temptation to add traceroute. The variant released by LBNL to that time was mostly sane and bugs in it were mostly not specific to Linux, but main reason was that the latest version of LBNL traceroute was not small, it consisted of several files, used a wicked (and failing with Linux ) autoconfiguration etc. So, instead I assembled to iputils a simplistic tracepath utility and IPv6 version of traceroute, and published my patches to LBNL traceroute separately.

• Current Version: 20211215 https://github.com/iputils/iputils

• Debian
  • Bugs: bugs.debian.org/iputils
  • Package State: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/iputils
• Gentoo
  • Bugs: bugs.gentoo.org
  • Package State: packages.gentoo.org/net-misc/iputils
• Redhat/Fedora
  • Bugs: bugzilla.redhat.com
  • Package State: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/iputils