Vasily

Vasily is a network troubleshooting utility that's a combination of ping, traceroute, and top. It repeatedly pings multiple hosts and displays the results in an easy-to-read format.

Requirements

Vasily has been tested with Go 1.23 on recent versions of:

• macOS (both unprivileged ICMP and raw sockets)
• Linux (both unprivileged ICMP and raw sockets)
• FreeBSD
• OpenBSD

It will likely also work on other UNIX systems that Go supports, provided they have standard support for raw sockets. Windows is currently unsupported.

Building

You will need Go version 1.23 or higher:

git clone https://github.com/pcekm/vasily
cd vasily
./scripts/buildrelease.sh

By default, Linux and macOS use unprivileged ICMP. To force the use of raw sockets, build with the rawsock tag:

./scripts/buildrelease.sh -tags=rawsock

Installing

For Linux and macOS systems using unprivileged ICMP, build the program and copy it to where you want it (e.g. /usr/local/bin). (But see the caveats about unprivileged ICMP on Linux below.)

cp vasily /usr/local/bin

For other systems that use raw sockets, you will also need to adjust its ownership and permissions so that it runs setuid root.

cp vasily /usr/local/bin
chown 0:0 /usr/local/bin/vasily
chmod u+s /usr/local/bin/vasily

Linux unprivileged ICMP

Depending on your distribution, you may need to adjust a setting on your Linux machine to enable unprivileged pings. If it panics with listen error: permission denied, change net.ipv4.ping_group_range. Something like this, followed by a reboot should do it:

# As root:
printf 'net.ipv4.ping_group_range=0\t10000\n' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

See the ICMP manpage for more information.

If you can't make it work, you can also build with the rawsock tag and install it setuid root as described above.