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From: Julyan Cartwright <julyan_at_hp1.uib.es>
Subject: SUMMARY: Network/packet analyser tool
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From: Julyan Cartwright <julyan_at_hp1.uib.es>
Subject: SUMMARY: Network/packet analyser tool
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Hi, last week I asked:
>
> We're having problems with poor network performance. What programs are
> out there to check out network performance? I'm thinking of something
> that would tell me what all the packets are; that sort of thing. I'll
> summarize, of course. Thanks,
> Julyan
I sent this question to both the DEC Alpha and the HP managers' lists,
since here we have both these machines. I'm also sending the same summary
to both lists, since I think a lot people are in the same position as we are
of having several different hardware platforms to run diagnostic tools on,
and as you will see, you have a lot more options to choose from if you can
pick your hardware...
I got replies from:
"Tor Sigurdsson" <ts_at_os.is>
nicolis_at_celfi.phys.univ-tours.fr
Arley Carter <ac_at_hawk.twinds.com>
Selden E Ball Jr <SEB_at_LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU>
"Tim W. Janes" <janes_at_signal.dra.hmg.gb>
Mark Bentkower <markb_at_best.com>
sanghvi_at_proto.wilm.ge.com (arun sanghvi)
Arnaud Valeix <fnet_at_ifh.sncf.fr>
"jprakashb" <jprakashb_at_inf.com>
Peter Marquardt <wwwutz_at_rag100.RZ-Berlin.MPG.DE>
Harald Lundberg <hl_at_tekla.fi>
koenigs_at_rfhds1002.fh.uni-regensburg.de (Christian Koenigseder)
mueller_at_vits02.dofn.de| (Norbert M\|ller)
jst9_at_netcom.com (Joseph S. Taylor)
Bill Hassell <blh_at_hpuerca.atl.hp.com>
Johan Larsson <100727.1316_at_compuserve.com>
...thanks, folks.
I'll try to distill their wisdom using the most relevent quotes:
1) Stuff that comes with the OS:
Alpha: (configure the kernel with the PACKFILTER option)
tcpdump nfswatch
HP:
nettl netfmt
Sun:
"If you have access to a sun running solaris 2.x you could use "snoop",
which is in the standard distribution."
I didn't find any of these programs adequate for what I needed.
2) Stuff you can buy:
"Believe it or not, HP makes 2 of the top 3 products for network
analysis. HP NetMetrix is a great analyzing tool, it breaks down
the packets by type and shows wihich individual conversations
are consuming the most bandwidth. It also lets you
look at the physical and transport layers individually.
HP also makes OpenView, which is an SNMP manager and good
at monitoring for specific traps and acting on them when they
occur.
Finally, Network General makes the "sniffer" tool
which looks at individual packets down to the headers level."
"There are quite a lot of commercial software like synoptic's optivity
and IBM's netview which is worth trying out."
I didn't investigate this route, since being a university, we don't have
money to spend on this sort of software :-(.
3) Free stuff you can get off the Net:
"TTCP is a benchmarking tool for determining TCP and UDP performance
between 2 systems.
The program was created at the US Army Ballistics Research Lab (BRL)
and is in the public domain. Feel free to distribute this program
but please do leave the credit notices in the source and man page intact."
"The best general purpose tool I have found is ethld104.zip that
unfortunately runs on a PC - but tracks down who and what is using the
bandwidth very easily. Well worth grabbing an old 386 machines that
would have been thrown out and dedicating it to network trouble
shooting."
"The program "etherman" is a fantastic tool with which you can monitor which
computers are communicating together, with an fantastic X-Window
environment"
I liked the sound of this last program, so I got a copy off the Net. It's
available from these two places at least:
ftp://ftp.cs.curtin.edu.au/pub/netman
ftp://ftp.informatik.hu-berlin.de/pub/unix/net/netman
You will find there binaries for Dec, SGI, and Sun (no HP yet...)
I got the DEC Alpha binary for etherman and had it working in a few minutes.
It is a very nice program that shows the high standards free software can
attain - I recommend it highly. For you HP-only people, I don't know if/when
an HP version will appear - somebody should definitely port it.
So what was my network problem, you ask... It is simply that we have too many
machines on the same segment connected by thinwire cable, and the capacity
is not sufficient for the peak traffic when all the machines are in use and
several people are running programs with graphics interfaces, compiling,
writing data, and generally creating traffic. This was very quickly spotted
with the graphical interface of etherman, which shows the traffic between
different machines as a chart with lines of thickness varying with the traffic.
The colour of the line represents the type of traffic - very useful if like us
you have IP, DecNET, Appletalk, and PC protocols all sharing the same ethernet.
Julyan
--
Julyan Cartwright Email julyan_at_hp1.uib.es
Departament de Fisica NeXTmail julyan_at_obelix.uib.es
Universitat de les Illes Balears WWW http://formentor.uib.es/~julyan
07071 Palma de Mallorca, Spain Tel/Fax (+34 71) 173230 / 173426
Received on Sat Sep 30 1995 - 19:52:39 NZST