[Techtalk] network tools

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 02:58:50PM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 11:41:53AM -0500, coldfire wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> I tried it out, and it's very nice. However, I need to monitor
> pan.lupercalia.net from syrinx.lupercalia.net. Over the public
> network. Is this possible, with any tool? Etherape doesn't do it
> (another nice gooey tool that shows you active connections on your
> machine). I don't want to watch raw packets, I want to monitor overall
> health and status in real time. A console app would be fine; I could
> keep it open in the corner of my monitor.

I don't know exactly what sort of things you are wanting to monitor
here, but I'll guess at network interface health, disk space, cpu load
and maybe ensuring certain services are always running.

I have been involved with using 'mon'
(http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/) in production environments that
needed to be up 24x7. It doesn't show the status as a regular update,
but it can be configured to send alerts (email or syslogging) when
certain triggers are set off. 

[In the interest of full disclosure, we no longer use mon, but have
written our own tools, since we need more involved monitoring of
resources on distributed systems. But for monitoring a handful of boxes,
I would still suggest 'mon' as something that should be evaluated.]

If this doesn't answer your question (which is different from the first
post in the thread), you could post the things you want to monitor and
maybe somebody will have more suggestions. My personal experience has
been that resource monitors, etc, are a dime a dozen, but a lot of them
aren't worth the dime you paid for them in any sort of serious setting.

Cheers,
Malcolm

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