OPNIX ROUTE INFORMATION TOOL


    Copyright (C) 2000-2001  Opnix, Inc.

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA

INSTALLATION

Simple:

make ; make install

If you don't want to do a make install, please note, this must be run as
root, in order to open raw sockets.  

THE PURPOSE OF THIS TOOL

Everyone knows that no one can agree on a system of metrics for measuring general
performance of the Internet.  It's one of these horrible religious issues that
no matter how hard we try, we just can't reach a happy middle ground.

The purpose of OPROUTE is to attempt to establish a *generalized* measurement
system which takes into account all of the factors that are usually considered
to be important when it comes to performance.  Specifically:

* Packet Loss
* Latency
* Layer 3 HOPS
* AS Hops
* NAP Hops
* Throughput (To be done, not in there yet)

WHAT OPROUTE DOES

Oproute takes all these measurements, normalizes them, and rates them
according to a preestablished priority.  This priority is as follows:

1) Packet Loss
2) Latency
3) Layer 3 HOPS
4) NAP Hops
5) AS Hops

The result of this normalization is the "OpScore" which is a number that
represents the *general* quality taking all these things into account.
The goal of this is that, by comparing two OpScores from two different
locations, you should be able to establish which location has the better
connectivity.  For the sake of "interesting geek factor" OpRoute comes
preconfigured to automatically do a comparison measurement from the Opnix
network, just so you can see what the same route looks like from Opnix.  
(This can be turned off by using the "-c no" switch.

The normalization is done at the Opnix server because we factor in the
NAP hops and the AS hops, which we get from our own database.  The 
process works like this:

We take each of the values, and we normalize them using the following method:

Metric              MIN         MAX

Layer 3 Hops         5           25
Latency             .35         300
Reliability          0          100
AS Hops              1           10
NAP Hops             0           2

We take the values we record, and use this scale to generate a normalized 
percentage.  Then we multiply that score times a weight that we have assigned
each of these values.  Those weights are:

Reliability: 40%
Latency: 30%
Layer 3 Hops: 16%
NAP Hops: 10%
AS Hops: 4%

The result is a number.  This number is then subtracted from 100 to yield 
the OpScore.

It's possible to get a negative OpScore for a very bad route.  It is also
possible to get an OpScore over 100.  Generally speaking though, the
higher the number, the better the route.  A score of 70-90 is pretty good for
reaching most of the net.  A score of 10-20 is pretty bad.

HOW TO USE OPROUTE

It's pretty simple, to run an oproute to say, www.opnix.com, do:

oproute www.opnix.com

Oproute should then show you your route to opnix.com, and Opnix's route.

COMMAND LINE SWITCHES

These are pretty basic.  We'll add more as we go:

-c no ---- turns off comparison to Opnix's network.
-n    ---- turns off reverse dns lookup on each router.

QUESTIONS/PROBLEMS/PATCHES

The OpRoute mailing list is at oproute-users@lists.opnix.net  Please
direct any questions or patches to that list.

TO DO

Please see the file "TODO" included with the distribution for the 
current TO DO list.