Requirements for adding new tools

[Dag Wieers]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Bernhard Fischer wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 11:20:07AM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> >On Thursday 23 March 2006 8:01 am, Dag Wieers wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I'm very interested to have tcptraceroute functionality in busybox in
> >> order to have bootable rescue images with the capability to check if
> >> firewalls are configured correctly and trace where the problems are.
> >>
> >> Is this a reasonable request or somehow (technically or
> >> philosophically) impossible or undesirable ?
> >
> >Sure, that sounds reasonable.  Go for it.  We could use a traceroute.
> 
> Just to clarify. We do have a traceroute, but our current one uses UDP,
> as opposed to the proposed one.

Yes, tcptraceroute is actually much more useful is it allows to test 
exactly what is allowed through a firewall. Instead of bouncing the 
problem between teams, we can effectively pinpoint what device is not 
properly configured and escalate directly :)

Seems silly, but that's what enables us to safe time in corporate politics 
:) Having it in busybox would be advantageous because often these systems 
are not yet deployed and need to be booted remotely with a small 
boot-image. (30MB takes already up to 10 minutes using the remote 
access virtual image boot)

Anyway, that's the use-case I'm now investigating if I have the proper 
skills to implement this myself or not.


> Generally (but i take this as abvious), if you can reuse as much stuff
> (from networking/libiproute in this case) as possible, and the applet
> is generally useful and is reasonably small, then don't hesitate to
> propose patches.

Well, the original tcptraceroute is using libnet. I'm not sure why this is 
required and if this is really necessary.

Is there some documentation on how to create an environment to do busybox 
development at a fast pace ? If not, I'm interested to add it based on 
comments on this list. (Best practices, tips on how to avoid known 
problems, etc...)

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]