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nifwin

This is a distributed traffic monitoring GUI. It graphically plots traffic levels on selected interfaces, and can collect realtime bandwidth usage reports from both local and remote instances of the Network-I traffic-collection service.
This assumes that Network-I has been set up as an inetd service on port 19681, aka the niftraff service, which would be the case if Network-I was formally installed as an RPM or Solaris package.

The reports sent back to the GUI consist only of an 8-byte TCP message once per second (or less frequently) reporting the number of packets and bytes seen, so they will not themselves become a significant source of network traffic. No packet contents are forwarded across the network.


Command Line Syntax

 nifwin takes the standard X command-line arguments.
For example,
means it will entirely fill a 1024x768 screen.

Input Fields and Buttons

 Interface
Enter the hostname or IP address of the interface at which you want to monitor traffic.
The specified address may be on a remote machine, if it also has Network-I installed.

Filter
This lets you enter a packet-filter expression, in the usual Network-I notation. This filter will be supplied to the traffic-collection service, which will only report on traffic that matches the filter.

Max Bandwidth
This lets you specify the graph's vertical scale, in Kilo-Bits per second.
You may set it to the max bandwidth permitted by your network (eg. 512, on a 512K ADSL interface, or 10000000 on a 10Mbps ethernet), or you may prefer to set it much lower, if you expect traffic levels to be much lower than the theoretical maximum and want fluctuations in the graph to be clearly visible.

Start
This kicks off the monitoring session. The GUI connects to a Network-I service, and starts plotting the reported traffic levels in the graph window.

Stop
This terminates the monitoring session.

Output Fields

 Packets
This field displays a running total of the number of packets reported so far.

Bytes
This field displays a running total of the number of bytes reported so far.

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