Sharing PingPlotter data

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[edit] Sharing PingPlotter data

[edit] Introduction

Troubleshooting network problems requires information, and the purpose of this article, in the vaguest of terms, is to create data for someone trying to troubleshoot a network problem.

Run PingPlotter in the background, tracing to the same host everyone else is, and share your results with everyone. This document enables you to use PingPlotter Standard 2.60 to do just that. The idea is that several friends share their PingPlotter data collaboratively, so that anyone having network problems can quickly look for hops near the mutual destination which are performing unsatisfactorily (high latency, packet loss, etc) along several folks' routes.

The vision is that you run this operation on a second, out-of-the-way machine on your LAN, as it does consume some system resources, but you can ultimately run it where you like.

While there is a featured-limited Freeware version, and a fully functional and time-limited trial version of Standard, the Standard version only costs $25 to license. I highly recommend the licensed version. When you experience poor network performance, having the right diagnostic tool can be THE difference between blind frustration and solving the problem.

The freeware version is definitely useful, but the instructions below expect you to have Standard 2.60 (there's also a Pro version, which I'm sure does everything expected below). If nothing else, download the trial version of Standard 2.60 and purchase it if you like it.

[edit] What will it look like when I'm finished?

The point of this is to publish data. It doesn't have to look fancy. The article gives you enough to make it happen, functionally. You can embelish the look of the published data with additional customizations, if you like. By default, the result is a humble webpage, showing the image results of trace sessions, and providing their datafiles for others to download.

Example output

[edit] Necessary PingPlotter Settings

[edit] General Options

You're going to be sharing data, and there's no reason for your IP address to be included in that data. So, configure Pingplotter to ignore the first two hops (your computer and ISP-owned nodes closest to you) when displaying trace session data.

Also, you're going to be running PingPlotter a lot, so configure it to minimize to an icon down by your clock.

  • Edit Menu > Options > General
    • General Options
      • Put icon in tool tray? YES
      • Starting Hop: Hop 3

We're going to be dealing with a lot of data, so let's trim PingPlotter back a bit, to only keep a limited amount of trace session data in the buffer, so that it doesn't consume too much system memory:

  • Edit Menu > Options > General
    • Memory Data Options
      • Maximum samples held in memory: 3600

[edit] Auto-Save Options

To share data, you've got to have sharable data. You need to make sure PingPlotter is periodically saving trace session data to disk. Configure PingPlotter to save both image and trace data:

  • Edit > Options > Auto-Save
    • Auto Save Data Options
      • Save Interval: 30 minutes
      • Filename: C:\pingplotterdata\$host-$year$month$day$hour$minute
    • Auto Save Image Options
      • Save Interval: 30 minutes
      • Filename: C:\pingplotterdata\$host-$year$month$day$hour$minute
      • File Type: PNG format

[edit] Tracing with PingPlotter

PingPlotter is now ready to begin tracing your destination. Begin a trace with PingPlotter, using the following settings for the trace. Replace %datahost% with your destination address:

  • Address to Trace: %datahost%
  • Sampling:
    • # of times to trace: Unlimited
    • Trace Interval: 1 second
  • Statistics
    • Samples to include: 3600

Once you've been tracing for a while, PingPlotter will create data files with the extensions .pp2 and .png. These are the files you want to share. So, the final step is actually sharing this information publicly.

[edit] Sharing the PingPlotter Data

We'll use three utilities to share the data to a public website. The upload to the public website occurs with a speed limit of 3K/sec, so it will not interrupt your gaming.

The three utilities are:

  • index.php (to display the data on a webpage)
  • curl (to upload the results to a public website)
  • publishdataimages.bat (to manage it all and delete old data files)

I've created an [archive of these utilities. The following are instructions for using the archive's contents.

You can adjust the values in the files as you wish, but the instructions below assume you're using the default settings defined below (and earlier in this article) and in the files themselves, including default filesystem paths.

  1. Extract the archive to c:\pingplotterdata
  2. Edit the FTP username and password at the top of publishdataimages.bat
  3. Create a scheduled task to run every 15 minutes in Windows configured to "Run" the following:
    • "C:\pingplotterdata\publishdataimages MINIMIZED.lnk"
    • This will launch the publishdataimages.bat batch file every 15 minutes, and it will start and end minimized, never interrupting whatever you're doing on the machine.
  4. After PingPlotter data has been uploaded by the scheduled task, use any FTP client to manually upload index.php (from the archive) into the folder on the web server where the data was uploaded.
  5. Browse to the newly uploaded index.php example. Leave PingPlotter always running in the background, and this page will stay up-to-date as your PingPlotter data is automatically updated by your scheduled task.

All you have to do now is make a page that links to the sites of several people, and everyone now has a fast method for quickly determining the mutual problem hops along many paths to a common destination.

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