Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Port usage question.

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 11:26:07 -0800
On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 09:22:40AM -0500, Matt Hanley wrote:
> I looking to gather information about which ports are being used on a
> particular system (not which ports are open, but which ones are in use, and
> how much).  Is it possible to configure Ethereal to gather that info?  I'm
> not looking to save the actual information contained in the packets.
> 
> I have a notion that there are packages out there better suited for the
> task,

NTOP might support computing those sorts of statistics by monitoring
traffic to and from that system (even when running *on* that system):

	http://www.ntop.org/

> so if any has any ideas let me know - keeping in mind that this is for
> a Solaris 2.6 box (which limits things quite a bit).

...but not as much as one might think, given that

	1) libpcap works on many platforms, including Solaris, so
	   packet-sniffing programs can be pretty portable;

	2) "dumb tty" programs should work on just about any UNIX on the
	   planet;

	3) curses has been around for ages, so "full-screen tty"
	   programs should work on just about any UNIX on the planet;

	4) the major GUI toolkits have been ported to most if not all of
	   the UNIX+X11's on the planet;

so a lot of software out there works on multiple platforms (and I
suspect a lot of it that doesn't could be made to do so with a little
attention paid to portability).

In particlar, according to the "Overview" page on the NTOP site, NTOP
runs on

	"Unix (including Linux, *BSD, Solaris, and MacOSX) 
	Win32 (Win95 and above)"