As QUIC has continued to mature,
the more tools we've seen for testing and implementing it.
Let's learn a few of them.
So up until now in our course, we've used Wireshark to look at QUIC.
Now, this is great, seeing things at the packet level,
but this is a very detailed approach to testing and troubleshooting QUIC.
After all, we need the packets, we also need to capture the TLS session keys,
and we need deep knowledge of where and what to look for at the packet level.
Now, bottom line, this can be overly detailed.
It can be overkill for what we need when we're just rolling
QUIC out or testing a new network path.
So let's move beyond packet data and see what we can do with some other tools,
so we're going to look at three major families of tools here in this module.
Now,
the first are online services that allow us to test
a public site for QUIC support.
To get a bit more detailed,
we can also use tools that are built into our local web browser that can help
to observe and troubleshoot QUIC connectivity. And last,
we'll talk about some command‑line tools that enable us to
manually generate or automate QUIC connections to servers to test
availability and successful configuration.
So let's take a closer look at that first tool.
With online tools, we, as users, first connect to a test server,
which is then able to send a QUIC connection to a desired site.
The response from the site will tell us whether QUIC is supported,
what versions are available,
and information about the security and transport settings in place.
Now,
this is a great way to quickly test publicly‑facing servers for QUIC support,
just to get an idea of whether people can access
these systems from the internet.
Now, one such tool that we could use is http3check.net.
Now there are several other of these tools,
so you could just do a QUIC Google search to find some other ones.
So this tool allows us to enter a hostname and then
verify that it's QUIC capable.
Now,
the report that this tool will generate will show us what
versions are supported on a server, as well as some advanced information,
such as the connection time and even 0‑RTT time.
Now, we'll take a look at this tool in just a minute in our demonstration.
Another tool that we could use is one that might be
built right into our browser, such as the developer tools in Chrome.
Now,
this feature allows us to test and monitor individual QUIC connections to sites
to get an idea of server response time and details around the HTTP/3 header
information. Now, one thing I like about this tool is it's built right into the
browser, all we have to do is enable it, and here's one example of the output of
the Chrome developer tools view.
So when this option is enabled and recording, Chrome can tell us
about the QUIC version use, who is hosting the site,
what the response time is, and much more. Now, other
browsers might have similar toolsets,
but for the second time, we're just going to focus on Chrome for now.
Now last, we have command‑line tools,
so these allow us to generate manual queries over HTTP/3 and QUIC to
servers to validate connectivity, one such tool is curl,
which is available on most systems today.
Now, at the time of this recording,
the present version of curl did not support QUIC; however,
there are experimental versions that can be built and utilized for command‑line testing of QUIC.