scamper is a program that is able to conduct Internet measurement tasks to large numbers of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, in parallel, to fill a specified packets-per-second rate. Currently, it supports the well-known ping and traceroute techniques, as well as radargun, ally, mercator, sting, and parts of tbit.

scamper's developer is Matthew Luckie.

Source Code

The current snapshot of scamper's source code is cvs-20111202c.

The code should compile and run under FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux 2.4 / 2.6, MacOS X, Solaris, Windows, and DragonFly. Not all of scamper will run on non-FreeBSD systems: for example, the sting and tbit code requires IPFW, which is found on FreeBSD and MacOS X.

All releases of scamper are licensed under the GPL v2.

Building Scamper

./configure
make
make install

Scamper is available in FreeBSD ports, NetBSD pkgsrc, OpenBSD ports, and in Debian/Ubuntu packages. The FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD packages should be up to date with the latest version of scamper.

Documentation

Much of scamper is documented in man pages included in the source code package.

• scamper man page.
• sc_ally man page: driver for Ally implementation
• sc_analysis_dump man page: convert scamper traces to something easily parsed with perl
• sc_attach man page: connect to scamper daemon and execute series of commands
• sc_tracediff man page: display traceroute paths that have changed
• sc_warts2pcap man page: generate pcap files from tbit and sting data
• sc_warts2text man page: generate simple text for human parsing
• sc_wartscat man page: concatenate warts files
• sc_wartsdump man page: detailed dump of scamper data collected
• libscamperfile man page: documentation on libscamperfile, a library to read and write warts files, as well as read CAIDA's ARTS files.

A paper describing scamper's motivation and architecture is available here. The cite for the paper is:

M. Luckie. Scamper: a Scalable and Extensible Packet Prober for Active Measurement of the Internet, Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference 2010, Melbourne, Australia, 1-3 Nov 2010, p. 239-245.

Release Announcements

If you would like to receive notifications of future releases of scamper, you may subscribe to the receive only mailing list scamper-announce by filling out this form.

Network Research

Here is a list of research done by the author using scamper.

Matthew Luckie, Amogh Dhamdhere, kc claffy, David Murrell (2011) Measured impact of crooked traceroute. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 41 (1), p. 14-21, January 2011. [PDF] [data and code]

Luckie, M., Stasiewicz, B. (2010) Measuring Path MTU Discovery Failures. Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference 2010. [PDF] [usage instructions] [scamper] [data]

Alistair King: Efficient Internet Topology Discovery Techniques. MSc thesis, University of Waikato, 2010. [PDF]

Stephen Eichler: IPv4/IPv6 ECN deployment. 2009 Class project: [results]

Luckie, M., Hyun, Y. and Huffaker, B. (2008) Traceroute Probe Method and Forward IP Path Inference. Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference 2008. [PDF] [scamper 20080808b snapshot] [data]

Luckie, M., Cho, K., and Owens, B. (2005) Inferring and Debugging Path MTU Discovery Failures. Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference 2005. [PDF] [scamper 20060331 snapshot]

Cho, K., Luckie, M., and Huffaker, B. (2004) Identifying IPv6 Network Problems in the Dual-Stack World. Proceedings of SIGCOMM Network Troubleshooting Workshop. [PDF] [scamper 20040613 snapshot] [tools]
scamper is the data collection tool used in the CAIDA IPv6 AS Core poster, and is part of CAIDA's Internet measurement infrastructure, Archipelago.

A third-party library written by Young Hyun at CAIDA for reading warts files is available at RubyForge.

Acknowledgements

The development of scamper was funded by the WIDE Project in association with CAIDA for the 12 month period ending April 2005.

Matthew Luckie, mjl at luckie.org.nz