ColorPing

How does it work?

Each IPv6 address in a /64 IPv6 subnet is associated to one pixel with color (RGB) information.
When an address is pinged, the corresponding pixel is changed on the canvas and displayed to all viewers via a webpage.

Setup

Run and assign a /64 IPv6 subnet to the created interface named canvas. The program needs to run as root or with the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.

Access the webpage where the canvas is displayed at: http://localhost:9090/

Example

./ColorPing
ip addr add fdcf:8538:9ad5:3333::1/64 dev canvas
ip link set up canvas

Ping format

????:????:????:????:XXXX:YYYY:11RR:GGBB

Where:

• ???? can be anything
• XXXX must be the target X coordinate of the canvas, encoded as hexadecimal
• YYYY must be the target Y coordinate of the canvas, encoded as hexadecimal
• RR target "red" value (0–255), encoded as hexadecimal
• GG target "green" value (0–255), encoded as hexadecimal
• BB target "blue" value (0–255), encoded as hexadecimal

Experimental io_uring option

For Linux kernel versions >= 5.1, an experimental option was added to use io_uring to improve performance. To use this option, add the -io-uring commandline flag.