Using the Command-line Interface

Even when no scripting is needed, the XRA-31 Command-line Interface has its merits. The three commands are shown here in typical day-to-day scenarios.

Storing and loading configurations

Channel configuration

While tools are at hand to ease the configuration of channels within the web interface, it can be a repetitive task when switching between setups. To ease this process, the xra31-configure command can be used to quickly store and load XRA-31 channel configurations.

Having configured an XRA-31 once for a given setup, be it from the web interface or a Python script, issuing the command

$ xra31-configure xra31_hostname --store configuration.json

will create a JSON file containing downstream channel parameters, the reference channel of choice and upstream UCIDs.

Whenever needed,

$ xra31-configure xra31_hostname --load configuration.json

will load this configuration back to the XRA-31.

Capture configuration

In the same way, the xra31-capture command can be used to store and load XRA-31 capture configurations, including

the channel selection,
the filtering options (packet types, OFDM streams and OFDM profiles), and
the output settings (stop criteria, rolling file options and paths).

$ xra31-capture xra31_hostname --store capture.json

$ xra31-capture xra31_hostname --load capture.json

Starting and stopping a capture

Starting an unlimited rolling file capture, keeping only the last 3 files with 60 seconds each, can be achieved as follows

$ xra31-capture xra31_hostname --path test_1/capture.pcap --size 0 --duration 0 --number-of-files 3 --file-size 0 --file-duration 60 --start

This capture can then be stopped from the web interface, Python, or with the command

$ xra31-capture xra31_hostname --stop

Downloading capture files

Finally, the capture files can be downloaded using the xra31-analyse command.

In the most common case, the latest capture file will be needed, and is available through the following command, optionally renaming it:

$ xra31-analyse xra31_hostname --download --output renamed.pcap

For most captures, gzip-compression can reduce file sizes significantly, and is available through the option --compress.

Specific files can be downloaded as well, using for example

$ xra31-analyse xra31_hostname --download --path test_1/capture_03.pcap --compress

Rolling file captures can be downloaded in one go, and will be concatenated to a single capture file. The following will download test_1/capture_*.pcap to capture.pcap.gz, and deletes the files from the XRA-31:

$ xra31-analyse xra31_hostname --download test_1/capture.pcap --rolling --compress --delete