| The tools in this book cover many aspects of network administration, from traffic analysis to log monitoring. Some of the tools, such as MRTG and NetFlow, are very widely used and nearly industry standards. Other tools, such as Neo and Oak, cover areas of network administration in which there is not yet a single tool that most administrators use. All of the tools described in this book are open source software, which means you may download and use them for free and you may modify them if you desire . The purpose of the book is to collect a good set of network administration tools in one place. Open source software developers are not known for spending serious time (or money) in self-advertising. So it can be a challenge to figure out which software is worthwhile and which is not. In addition to pointing out the good software, this book explains how the software works and how to install and use it. The chapters are: -
SNMP. The Simple Network Management Protocol is the standard for remote administration of network devices. Chapter 2 includes a well-known set of tools for accessing information via SNMP. -
MRTG. The Multi Router Traffic Grapher is a very widely used tool for graphing bandwidth and other network statistics. -
Neo. This tool was written at MIT for high-level administration of switches, routers, and other devices that speak SNMP. -
NetFlow. NetFlow is a Cisco mechanism for collecting information about the internals of network traffic. Chapter 5 describes a well-known package called Flow-Tools that collects and processes NetFlow information. -
Oak. Oak is a tool written at MIT for collecting syslog messages from servers and network equipment, condensing the information as appropriate, and notifying operators of problem conditions when they arise. -
Service Monitoring. The Sysmon program, covered in detail in Chapter 7, tests network hardware and server software to ensure they are functioning, and if they are not, it notifies the appropriate administrators. The Nagios program, a more complex tool that serves the same purpose, is briefly discussed as well. -
Tcpdump. This is a standard program for directly analyzing network traffic at the packet level. -
Basic Tools. Chapter 9 covers the basic tools of network administration, including the ping, telnet, netcat, traceroute, MTR, and netstat programs. -
Custom Tools. In Chapter 10, a brief, working knowledge of the Bourne shell and Perl scripting languages is presented. If you encounter a bug in any one of the programs described in this book or find that a particular feature would be be a real benefit, do your part and mail the maintainers of the software. Don't be shy; they want to hear your feedback. However, do not expect that your problems will be solved overnight.  |
