Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Traffic burst detector.

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From: Jack Coates <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 15:17:30 -0800
Rob Miller wrote:
Hello,

We are trying to detect where burst of traffic is coming from. We've used Ethereal to view all traffic over a period of time and find that there are 15 second bursts of traffic occurring sporadically from one or more of our network stations. Unfortunately There is no way to tell where the traffic is coming from as it is buried among thousands of other packets.
What we need is a monitor that measures traffic per second and if the 
traffic is greater than a certain threshold, it captures that second's 
worth of packets and puts it into file to be analyzed later. The 
analysis would have some way of showing all the different sources of 
traffic along with the total amount for each source.
Could you suggest some simplified way of analyzing our traffic from that 
point of view.
dunno about simple, but if you've got Linux this is possible with 
scripting. Personally, I'd write a bash script to run once a minute. Use 
grep, sed and/or awk to grab the traffic load from /proc/net/dev and 
compare it to the load you saw at the last run... if greater than your 
threshold, then run tcpdump -w [file] -c [500 or so] -i [interface] and 
mail yourself the resulting pcap file.
--
Jack at Monkeynoodle dot Org: It's a Scientific Venture...
Riding the Emergency Third Rail Power Trip since 1996!