Today I chanced across a new app, tcptrack. It's a terminal interface app, so would run in a terminal window or in a text VC. It displays open tcp connections and their average bandwidth if active or their idle time otherwise, as well as client and server IPs, in a top reminiscent display. This of course has a number of uses, but the one that came to mind here and why I'm posting to the list is its use for monitoring the individual bandwidth various pan connections are using.
tcptrack uses the pcap library for capture, and will require either run as root or set SUID root in most cases. It normally puts the interface you attach it to in promiscuous mode and can thus track any connections that go by it on a WLAN or hub based wired Ethernet connection, not just those of its own machine, altho that can be disabled. The only caveat is with connections open before tcptrack is run. Since it only tracks them by packet capture, unlike say netstat, it won't see entirely idle connections established before it was run. Until it sees a packet on the connection, it doesn't know it's there. With such connections it also has no way of knowing for sure which IP is the server and which is the client end, so it guesses for purposes of display, assuming that the IP associated with the lower numbered port is the server. While this works reasonably well for connections to servers on the well known ports, it's not going to be particularly accurate for connections to servers on the unrestricted higher ports. Of course, since news servers normally listen on port 119/nntp, that shouldn't be particularly troubling for our uses here. I figured some pan users might find this app of interest. If you do, check and see if your distribution carries it! (Gentoo does, which is how I discovered it while doing tab completion on a tcptr<tab>(aceroute) reinstall, noted the tcptrack name as a completion option, and decided to investigate.) Alternatively or for more info, here's its homepage, complete with a screenshot: http://www.rhythm.cx/~steve/devel/tcptrack/ -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
