rtmon – listens to and monitors RTnetlink

rtmon [ options ] file FILE [ all | LISTofOBJECTS ]

This manual page documents briefly the rtmon command.

rtmon listens on netlink socket and monitors routing table changes.

rtmon can be started before the first network configuration command is issued. For example if you insert:

rtmon file /var/log/rtmon.log

in a startup script, you will be able to view the full history later. Certainly, it is possible to start rtmon at any time. It prepends the history with the state snapshot dumped at the moment of starting.

rtmon supports the following options:

-Version

Print version and exit.

help Show summary of options.

file FILE [ all | LISTofOBJECTS ]

Log output to FILE. LISTofOBJECTS is the list of object types that we want to monitor. It may contain ‘link’, ‘address’, ‘route’ and ‘all’. ‘link’ specifies the network device, ‘address’ the protocol (IP or IPv6) address on a device, ‘route’ the routing table entry and ‘all’ does what the name says.

-family [ inet | inet6 | link | help ]

Specify protocol family. ‘inet’ is IPv4, ‘inet6’ is IPv6, ‘link’ means that no networking protocol is involved and ‘help’ prints usage information.

-4 Use IPv4. Shortcut for -family inet.

-6 Use IPv6. Shortcut for -family inet6.

-0 Use a special family identifier meaning that no networking protocol is involved. Shortcut for -family link.

# rtmon file /var/log/rtmon.log

Log to file /var/log/rtmon.log, then run:

# ip monitor file /var/log/rtmon.log

to display logged output from file.

ip(8)

rtmon was written by Alexey Kuznetsov <kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru>.

This manual page was written by Michael Prokop <mika@grml.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).