[Ilugc] Network monitoring tool for linux

[Girish Venkatachalam]

On 15:50:56 Feb 12, Thangamani Arul wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I need good open source network monitoring tool which is suitable for any
> linux distro.
> Can you please some one sugges.

There is a huge laundry list.

There are very many variations in what each tool does for you.

Depending on your taste, whim or the mood on that particular hour you
can choose one.

I shall try to enumerate a few. For more details check out this link.

http://del.icio.us/girish1729/monitoring

and more importantly this one.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/bandwidth-monitoring-tools-for-linux.html

Network monitoring tools have always fascinated me and that is perhaps
the reason I have not spent enough time playing with them. ;)

Perhaps one day I shall find the time.

Depending upon the layer at which you want to monitor you can choose any
tool starting with tcp- for most common protocols that run above TCP.

For IP and ethernet and even WiFi there are tools for sniffing
passwords, for bandwidth monitoring, packet counting and so on.

I find ethereal ( I think it is called wireshark or something now)
eminently suited for most purposes. It has an excellent GUI and is so
user friendly.

You can look at tcpdump which is good too.

But this will only give you packet decodes. Unless you are interested in
developing or reverse engineering protocols this may not fascinate you
much.

For most general purposes you can shop around the above links or look at
this.

$ grep ^net /store/packages.txt  
net-snmp-5.4p1.tgz
netatalk-2.0.3p1.tgz
netbeans-5.5p0.tgz
netcdf-3.5.0p1.tgz
netdude-0.4.6p0.tgz
netdude-traffic-analyzer-plugin-0.3p0.tgz
nethack-3.4.3p1-no_x11.tgz
nethack-3.4.3p1-qt.tgz
nethack-3.4.3p1.tgz
netperf-2.3p1.tgz
netpipe-2.4.tgz
netpipes-4.2-export.tgz
netrate-20070208.tgz
netris-0.52.tgz
netsed-0.01c.tgz
netstrain-3.0.tgz
netwmpager-1.11.tgz


Here are the tcp tools I spoke about.

$ grep ^tcp /store/packages.txt                                                                       
tcpblast-1.1.tgz
tcpcat-1.2.0.tgz
tcpdpriv-1.1.10p0.tgz
tcpflow-0.21p0.tgz
tcplist-2.2p0.tgz
tcpreen-1.4.3.tgz
tcpreplay-1.0.1.tgz
tcpshow-1.74.tgz
tcpslice-20070709.tgz
tcpstat-1.4.tgz
tcptrace-6.2.0p0.tgz
tcptraceroute-1.5beta7.tgz

The good old netstat is incredibly useful too if you know how to read a
man page.

On the BSDs there are tools like symon, vmstat, iostat and so on. I am
sure many of them are available on linux as well.

Hope this helps.

-Girish