The goal of this manual is to document the tcptrace program; to explain how to get it installed, explain its capabilities, how to get it do all it can do, what all the output it generates mean, and how they are calculated, etc. However, the goal is not to explain the working of the TCP/IP protocol suite itself, and there are nice books that do this already. I recommend my favorite book [7] if you need to understand the TCP/IP protocol suite better, or if commonly used TCP/IP parlance like ``SACK'', ``CWND'', ``pure ACK'' etc., are not familiar to you.
The manual is organized into chapters with the goal of making them as modular as possible so that they can be read independently of one another. It consists of the following chapters :
If you are a tcptrace Power-user familiar with the program, and are just looking for the option that generates the output you need, you might dive straight into Appendix A: Arguments Quick Reference. You may find answers to some of your xplot related questions in Appendix B: XPLOT Quick Reference. The syntactical definitions of common protocol headers are provided in Appendix C Protocol Quick Reference.
Finally, in a slight abuse of parlance, the terms ``segments'' and ``packets'' have been used interchangeably in the manual. However it would be clear from context, for e.g., if we say ``TCP packets'' we mean ``TCP segments''. Hopefully it would not be a cause of concern.
Thanks
Thanks are due to my friend Avinash S. Lakhiani for working on an earlier version of the manual and for getting the Documentation project kick-started. Some sections of the manual have been drawn directly from his manuscript. Thanks are also due to the Python Software Foundation for the style files from the Python Documentation Project used for generating this manual.