tsgtrace(1)

Name

tsgtrace - Show a trace of line activity on stdout

Syntax

tsgtrace [-n [netID | name]] [-h] [-t] [-p] [-I] [-X] [-a] [-e] [-w] [[-r | -R]] [-s nnn] [-o] [-x] [-F] [-L] [-d]

Description

tsgtrace interprets trace buffers maintained by the protocol software to display the contents of all frames exchanged with the remote on the standard output device. Frames arriving from the remote with incorrect CRC characters are not displayed.

Exit tsgtrace by striking any key or the interrupt key for your tty, or via the -x option.

These options are recognized:

Option

Description

-a

toggles the display of hex data as printable ASCII characters where non-printable characters are converted to periods.

-e

toggles the display of hex data as printable EBCDIC characters where non-printable characters are converted to periods.

-D nnn

causes tsgtrace to display data from one DLCI only (Frame Relay links only).

-F

toggles tsgtrace to start/stop a symbolic display of packet level facilities (X.25 links only).

-h

provides help on available command line arguments.

-I

toggles the symbolic display of Internet Protocol (IP) headers when the first four bits of a data packet are 0100, for IP header version 4. When 'on' this option also causes a symbolic display of packet level data.

-L nnn

causes tsgtrace to display data from one LCI only (X.25 links only).

-n [netID | netname]

Allows specification of the network Name or ID to trace. Network names and IDs are given in the file /etc/packetnets.

-o

causes tsgtrace to poll the board continuously. This option sometimes prevents log buffer overflows yet can also be very hard on CPU resources.

-p

toggles tsgtrace to start/stop a symbolic display of packet level data (X.25 links only).

[-r | -R]

causes the program to turn on (-r) or off (-R) frame level RR tracing.

-s nnn]

causes the program to use frame trace buffer sizes other than the default of 14. nnn is a decimal number, the maximum length of frames that will be stored. The maximum value is 80 bytes.

-t

causes the time of the frame's arrival to be printed in the first column.

-w

causes the program to display raw data. No protocol headers will be interpreted.

-x

causes tsgtrace to exit if it was about to wait for more frames to arrive. Otherwise, tsgtrace exits when you hit the keyboard.

-X

causes TCP/UDP/ICMP headers to be symbolically displayed.

The format of a trace element is as follows.

[time] direction adrs* decoded_hdlc hex_data [ascii_data]

where

Parameter

Description

time

optional time stamp of frame.

direction

is at the left margin. When it is `T' or `R', it signals the start of a frame, and indicates the direction that the frame travelled in, from the local machine's point of view:

"T" is for data transmitted to the remote, and
"R" for data received from the remote.

If it is blank, the display line is a continuation of the previous frame. The line will contain only a continuation of the hex_data field for the frame.

seqno

is a sequence number in the range 0 to 255, which you can use as a check on the integrity of the tsgtrace display. If frames appear out of sequence (due to an internal trace buffer overflow -- data moving faster than it can be printed), the sequence numbers won't be contiguous, and the trace displayed is invalid.

adrs*

is the HDLC address byte.

For X.25 it is decoded as `A' for hex 03, `B' for hex 01, `C' for hex 0F, or `D' for hex 07. C and D are used with Multi-Link Procedure X.25. If the address byte is any other value, tsgtrace displays it in hex. If the `*' is present, the frame has the Poll or the Final bit set.

For Frame Relay, the address is the DLCI.

decoded_hdlc

is a character string with symbolic decomposition of the HDLC control byte(s). Unnumbered control frames are displayed as their CCITT mnemonics. Frames with sequence numbers (I frames and RR/RNR/REJ frames) contain sequence numbers in parentheses:

I(4,5) represents an I frame with N(S) = 4 and N(R) of 5.

When tsgtrace doesn't recognize the control byte(s), it displays them as hexadecimal bytes.

hex_data

contains the remainder of the HDLC frame (if any). It doesn't include the Frame Check Sequence (CRC) bytes. The program decodes each byte of data and displays it as two hexadecimal digits. If -p, -I or -X is specified, this area will contain packet level information, IP header decoding and TCP/UDP/ICMP header decoding if enabled. The rest of the data is given in hexadecimal.

ascii_data

optional ascii equivalent of hex data.

See Also

X.25 Troubleshooting in the Administrator's Guide.

Troubleshooting LAPB in the Administrator's Guide.


Revision 6.3.0 (April 2004)

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