[Techtalk] network tools

[coldfire]

> I'm interested in finding out what network tools other people are using
> on their systems for several tasks:
> 
> 1. Packet sniffing. I know tcpdump is very popular, but from what I can
> tell, it only looks at packet headers. What utilities are there to
> actually capture and look at entire packets?

i'm a big fan of ethereal .. especially since it now supports 802.11b
frames really well :)  it's a nice graphical interface and will tell the
less TCP/IP knowledgable users exactly which flags were set, what they
mean, etc.

> 2. Traffic counters. By this I mean being able to monitor on a per
> interface basis the amount of traffic going in and out. A programme that
> tells you something like 240bytes has gone outward from eth1 and 397
> bytes have come in on eth0.

'ifconfig' can tell you these stats .. as for pretty programs that graph
daily statistics, etc. i've never used them for my personal use.

> 3. Bandwidth throttling: Here I mean tools that limit the throughput on
> a particular interface. So you can specify something like on eth1, its
> never allowed to go above some rate /sec

the advanced routing howto might answer your question better than i could.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Adv-Routing-HOWTO.html#toc9

that's a really beautiful howto, actually :)


coldie