pmacct - IPv4/IPv6 accounting package / News: Recent posts

pmacct is a small set of passive network monitoring tools to measure, account, classify, aggregate and export IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. Suitable to ISP, IXP, CDN, IP carrier, data-centre and hot-spots enviroments, runs on Linux, BSDs and Solaris. It collects data through libpcap, NetFlow and sFlow and writes to a number of backends including memory tables, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

pmacct 0.12 continues the track of innovation which distinguishes the project by introducing BGP peering capabilities and per-peer RIBs in a NetFlow/sFlow collector. This offers new aggregation primitives (AS PATH, BGP communities, local preference and MED among the others) and augments visibility into the network. This release also includes a set of implementations to tackle the problematic Peer Source AS primitive, to deal with partial or default-only routing tables and to make the package fully support 32-bit ASNs. ... read more

pmacct DAEMONS ARE NOW ABLE TO CREATE AND EXPORT NETFLOW PACKETS: a new 'nfprobe' plugin is available and allows to create NetFlow v1/v5/v9 datagrams and export them to a IPv4/IPv6 collector. The work is based on softflowd 0.9.7 software. A set of configuration directives allows to tune timeouts (nfprobe_timeouts), cache size (nfprobe_maxflows), collector parameters (nfprobe_receiver), TTL value (nfprobe_hoplimit) and NetFlow version of the datagrams to be exported (nfprobe_version). Many thanks to Ivan A. Beveridge, Peter Nixon and Sven Anderson for their support and thoughts and
to Damien Miller, author of softflowd. pmacct DAEMONS ARE NOW ABLE TO CREATE AND EXPORT SFLOW PACKETS: a new 'sfprobe' plugin is available and allows to create sFlow v5 datagrams and export them to a IPv4 collector. The work is based on InMon sFlow Agent 5.6 software. A set of configuration directives allows to tune sampling rate (sfprobe_sampling_rate), sFlow agent IP address (sfprobe_agentip), collector parameters
(sfprobe_receiver) and agentSubId value (sfprobe_agentsubid). Many thanks to InMon for their software and Ivan A. Beveridge for his support.

The 0.9 release is ended with the year 2005 and a
very stable version, 0.9.6. 2006 starts with the
new 0.10 series.

The main news is the introduction of PACKET
CLASSIFICATION capabilities into pmacctd: the
implemented approach is fully extensible:
classification patterns are based on regular
expressions (RE), human-readable, must be placed
into a common directory and have a .pat file
extension. Many patterns for widespread protocols
are available at L7-filter project homepage. To
support this feature, a new 'classifiers'
configuration directive has been added. It expects
full path to a spool directory containing the
patterns.

PMACCT OPENS TO SQLITE 3.x: a fully featured SQLite, version 3.x only, plugin has been introduced; SQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL (almost all SQL92) database engine. The plugin is LOCK-based and supports the "recovery mode" via an alternate database action. Expecially suitable for tiny and embedded environments. The plugin can be fired using the keyword 'sqlite3'. See CONFIG-KEYS and EXAMPLES for further informations.... read more

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pmacct is a small set of passive network monitoring tools to meter, account and aggregate IPv4 and IPv6 traffic; data collection occurs via either libpcap or NetFlow v1/v5/v7/v8/v9 datagrams. Backend support include: MySQL, PostgreSQL and memory tables.

Homepage: http://www.ba.cnr.it/~paolo/pmacct/
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Regular release updates (files) will be posted here. And the bug tracking system will be actively consulted aswell. Though, many of the other useful features offered by SourceForge have been disabled in the effort of clustering discussions and contacts to just a very minimal set of email addresses, available on the project homepage.... read more