Scroll to navigation

PINGD(1) Echolot PINGD(1)

NAME

pingd - echolot ping daemon

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

pingd is the heart of echolot. Echolot is a pinger for anonymous remailers.

A Pinger in the context of anonymous remailers is a program that regularily sends messages through remailers to check their reliability. It then calculates reliability statistics which are used by remailer clients to choose the chain of remailers to use.

Additionally it collects configuration parameters and keys of all remailers and offers them in a format readable by remailer clients.

When called without parameters pingd schedules tasks like sending pings, processing incoming mail and requesting remailer-xxx data and runs them at configurable intervalls.

COMMANDS

Start the ping daemon.
Send the running pingd process a SIGTERM.
Sends a HUP signal to the daemon which instructs it to process the commands.

For other effects of sending the HUP Signal see the SIGNALS section below.

Add address to the list of remailers to query for keys and confs.
Delete address from the list of remailers to query for keys and confs. Delete all statistics and keys for that remailer.

Note that echolot will add back this remailer if it learns of it from other remailers again. If you do not want that, use the disable command.

Shorthand for set showit=off pingit=off fetch=off. This makes echolot completely ignore that remailer, until you enable it again.
Shorthand for set showit=on pingit=on fetch=on.
Possible options and values:
Set showit (show remailer in mlist, rlist etc.) for remailer address to either on or off.
Set pingit (send out pings to that remailer) for remailer address to either on or off.
Set fetch (fetch remailer-key and remailer-conf) for remailer address to either on or off.
Some remailers (Mixmaster V2 - currently lcs and passthru2) don't return a useable remailer-conf message. For such remailers you need to set it manually.

For instance:

    ./pingd setremailercaps '$remailer{"passthru2"} = "<mixer@immd1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> mix middle";'
    ./pingd setremailercaps '$remailer{"lcs"} = "<mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu> mix klen1000";'
    
Delete remailer-conf data for address. The config data will be reset from the next valid remailer-conf reply by the remailer.
Send a command to immediatly request keys and configuration from remailers. If no addresses are given requests will be sent to all remailers.
Send a command to immediatly send pings to the given remailers. If no addresses are given requests will be sent to all remailers.
Send a command to immediatly send chain pings to the given chains. A chain is two remailer addresses seperated by a colon.
Send a command to immediatly rebuild stats.
Send a command to immediatly rebuild the keyrings.
Send a command to immediatly rebuild the Thesaurus.
Send a command to immediatly rebuild the From Header lines page.
Print a status summary of all known addresses to the log (level notice).
Dumps the current configuration to standard output.

OPTIONS

The home directory to which everything else is relative. See the BASE DIRECTORY section below.
Verbose mode. Causes pingd to print debugging messages about its progress.
Quiet mode. Be even quieter than normal.
Print a short help message and exit sucessfully.
Print version number and exit sucessfully.
Usefull only with the add, set, setremailercaps, deleteremailercaps, getkeyconf, sendpings, sendchainpings, buildstats, buildkeys, buildthesaurus, buildfromlines, or summary command.

Don't send a HUP signal to the daemon which instructs it to process the commands after adding the command to the task list.

By default such a signal is sent.

Usefull only with the start command.

Read and process the commands file on startup.

Usefull only with the start command.

Tell pingd to detach.

BASE DIRECTORY

The home directory to which everything else is relative.

Basedir defaults to whatever directory the pingd binary is located. It can be overridden by the ECHOLOT_HOME environment variable which in turn is weaker than the --basedir setting.

This directory is then used to locate the configuration file pingd.conf (see FILES below).

The homedir setting in pingd.conf finally sets the base directory.

FILES

The configuration file is searched in these places in this order:

<basedir>/pingd.conf
$HOME/echolot/pingd.conf
$HOME/pingd.conf
$HOME/.pingd.conf
/etc/echolot/pingd.conf
/etc/pingd.conf

ENVIRONMENT

SIGNALS

On SIGINT, SIGQUIT, and SIGTERM pingd will schedule a shutdown for as soon as the current actions are finished or immediatly if no actions are currently being processed. It will then write all metadata and pingdata to disk and close all files cleanly before exiting.

On SIGHUP <pingd> will execute any pending commands from the commands file (commands.txt by default). It also closes and reopens the file 'output' which is used for stdout and stderr when the daemon is running detached. This can be used if you want to rotate that file.

AUTHOR

Peter Palfrader <peter@palfrader.org>

BUGS

Please report them at <URL:http://alioth.debian.org/projects/echolot/>

2014-10-23 2.1.9