CoralReef Frequently Asked Questions

Contact coral-info@caida.org if your question is not answered here.

1. General Questions

• 1.1 What is CoralReef?
• 1.2 What is the status of the project?
• 1.3 What are the differences between the members only version of CoralReef and the not-for-profit version that is available on the CAIDA web site?

2. Hardware Questions

• 2.1 What are the CoralReef machine specs?
• 2.2 What are the specifications for the OCx interface card?
• 2.3 What sort of splitters are required and where they be purchased?
• 2.4 Are there any remaining sources for the former Apptel POINT cards?
• 2.5 I followed your specs and bought all the parts. Now when my machine boots up I can see that two devices try to share the same IRQ. Is this ok?
• 2.6 Is there a vendor or system integrator you people can recommend?

3. Link Layer

• 3.1 What protocols does CoralReef support?
• 3.2 Will the ATM cards support culling traffic from specific VCs?
• 3.3 Will CoralReef enable me to get the cards to echo (pass-through) ATM cells (which would make it possible to splice the card into the existing fiber link instead of splitting off part of the signal for the card)?
• 3.4 What about SDH on European links?
• 3.5 What POS support does CoralReef provide?
• 3.6 Does Coralreef support any Gigabit Ethernet cards?
• 3.7 When I use CoralReef's cell reassemble function, how can I make sure that no cells are lost?

4. Transport Layer

• 4.1 Will the ATM cards support culling traffic from specific IP address/flows/VCs?
• 4.2 Can I play back traffic using your CoralReef software?
• 4.3 Do you have a tcpdump to coral converter?
• 4.4 Do you have a coral to tcpdump converter?

5. Software

• 5.1 How do I start using the software?
• 5.2 Where can a get a routing table to use t2_report[++]?
• 5.3 How can one control when a flow is finished using crl_flow? Does crl_flow use the FIN packet for flow termination?

6. Analysis modules

• 6.1 How can I convert an IP address into an AS (Autonomous System) number?
• 6.2 How do I get routing tables for ASFinder?

7. Human Interface

• 7.1 Is it possible to generate HTML reports using CoralReef?
• 7.2 I have many scripts that work on the old NLANR Coral format. How can I make them work with the new package?
• 7.3 What is the CoralReef file format?
• 7.4 Do you have a description of all the applications that come with CoralReef?

8. Troubleshooting

• 8.1 When compiling on a LINUX system, I get errors involving bool. How do I fix these?
• 8.2 The Perl applications complain about undefined symbols. How do I fix this?
• 8.3 Why do the cell timestamps jump backward in my POINT trace? Why do some applications report intervals with negative duration?
• 8.4 Why do the cell timestamps jump backward in my FATM trace?
• 8.5 Why does the point card sometimes report -185273100 or -454761244 cells lost?
• 8.6 Why does running some Coral applications appear to cause cell/packet loss when the applications are run for a short durations?
• 8.7 Why do CoralReef applications crash the first time one is run on a DAG card?
• 8.8 How do I fix this error on a dag device: coral_open: /dev/dag0: ioctl FILLINFO: Inappropriate ioctl for device?
• 8.9 Why does the report generator t2_report[++] report a large number of Autonomous Systems (AS's) as unknown?
• 8.10 Why doesn't my pcap filter expression match any packets on my VLAN?