ISDNTRACE (8) | System administration commands and daemons | Unix Manual Pages

SYNOPSIS

isdntrace [-a] [-b] [-d] [-f filename] [-h] [-i] [-l] [-n number] [-o] [-p filename] [-r] [-u number] [-x] [-B] [-F] [-P] [-R unit] [-T unit]

DESCRIPTION

The isdntrace utility is part of the isdn4bsd package and is used to provide the user with a mnemonic display of the layers 1, 2 and 3 protocol activities on the D channel and hex dump of the B channel(s) activities.

Together with two passive supported cards and an easy to build cable it can also be used to monitor the complete traffic on a S0 bus providing S0 bus analyzer features.

The isdntrace utility is only available for passive supported cards.

Note

All filenames, user specified or default, get a date and time stamp string added in the form -yyyymmdd-hhmmss: a hyphen, four digits year, two digits month and day, a hyphen and two digits hour, minutes and seconds. Tracefiles no longer get overwritten. In case a new filename is needed within a second, the filename-generating mechanism sleeps one second.

In case the program is sent a USR1 signal, a new user specified or default filename with a new date and timestamp is generated and opened.

The following options can be used:

-a	Run isdntrace in analyzer mode by using two passive cards and a custom cable which can be build as described in the file cable.txt in the isdn4bsd source distribution. One card acts as a receiver for the transmitting direction on the S0 bus while the other card acts as a receiver for the receiving direction on the S0 bus. Complete traffic monitoring is possible using this setup.
-b	switch B channel tracing on (default off).
-d	switch D channel tracing off (default on).
-f	Use filename as the name of a file into which to write tracing output (default filename is isdntrace<n> where n is the number of the unit to trace).
-h	switch display of header off (default on).
-i	print layer 1 (I.430) INFO signals to monitor layer 1 activity (default off).
-l	switch displaying of Layer 2 (Q.921) frames off (default on).
-n	This option takes a numeric argument specifying the minimum frame size in octets a frame must have to be displayed. (default 0)
-o	switch off writing trace output to a file (default on).
-p	Use filename as the name of a file used for the -B and -P options (default filename is isdntracebin<n> where n is the number of the unit to trace).
-r	Switch off printing a raw hexadecimal dump of the packets preceding the decoded protocol information (default on).
-u	Use number as the unit number of the controller card to trace (default 0).
-x	Switch on printing of packets with a non-Q.931 protocol discriminator. (default off).
-B	Write undecoded binary trace data to a file for later or remote analyzing (default off).
-F	This option can only be used when option -P (playback from binary data file) is used. The -F option causes playback not to stop at end of file but rather to wait for additional data to be available from the input file. This option is useful when trace data is accumulated in binary format (to save disk space) but a monitoring functionality is desired. (default off).
-P	Read undecoded binary trace data from file instead from device (default off).
-R	Use unit as the receiving interface unit number in analyze mode.
-T	Use unit as the transmitting interface unit number in analyze mode.

When the USR1 signal is sent to a isdntrace process, the currently used logfiles are reopened, so that logfile rotation becomes possible.

The trace output should be obvious. It is very handy to have the following standard texts available when tracing ISDN protocols:

I.430	ISDN BRI layer 1 protocol description.
Q.921	ISDN D-channel layer 2 protocol description.
Q.931	ISDN D-channel layer 3 protocol description.
1TR6	German-specific ISDN layer 3 protocol description. (NOTICE: decoding of the 1TR6 protocol is included but not supported since i dont have any longer access to a 1TR6 based ISDN installation.)