explorer

Click Explorer

The click explorer utility affords some control over certain XIA click elements while your network is running. It can be launched as follows:

bin/explorer/explorer

Click explorer operates in one of two modes: global and device-centric. In device-centric mode, commands apply to one particular device; to enter device-centric mode, simply type the name of a device (to see a list of available devices, use the devices command).

Example: Enabling Packet Traces

You can use the help command for a complete list of available commands, but a good example use is changing a device's verbosity: each host and router can print a trace of the packets arriving on and leaving each port, which can be incredibly useful for debugging (especially in local Click topologies where utilities like tcpdump and Wireshark cannot "see" your packets). For example, the following commands show all traffic passing through port 1 on router 0:

> router0
router0> verbosity 1 3

Important: For this to work, you must have started xianet with the -v flag.

The verbosity levels are:

• 0 = print nothing
• 1 = unused
• 2 = print all traffic except daemon (xroute and xhcp) traffic
• 3 = print all traffic

Known Issues

When using the packet trace functionality described above, you may encounter two issues:

• XARP and XCMP packets cause erroneous "truncated xia" messages. These can be ignored.
• Packets sent to the name server are not displayed at verbosity level 2.

Both issues have been fixed on the develop branch and will be pushed to master soon.