Files

Installation and a description of the files

Installation

This program runs best on Windows 2000. In Windows XP SP2 Microsoft added a feature to cripple the TCP/IP stack as a security enhancement. Windows XP SP2 and Vista limit half-open connections (SYN) to a maximum of 10 (the previous limit was over 65,000). This is supposed to slow down certain viruses because their spreading strategy is to try to connect to a high amount of random IP numbers, but it also stops any network intensive program from working. There are patch files available on the internet to raise or remove this limit Search for something like "TCP connections patch".

This program needs Microsoft .Net 2.0 installed, on Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It also needs a copy of RRDTool.exe. Copy the files to a suitable directory. Start nms.exe to run the program. The program either uses the information in the file discovery.xml or if this is not found then it uses the IP address of the PC to start scanning a class C subnet for other devices.

During this scanning phase the program is very slow and can take a minute or so to redraw the display or terminate.

For a clean start delete any old device.xml, .rrd or .png files. Delete or edit the file discovery.xml. This has the SNMP community name and the start and end addresses for the simple scan discovery.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Discovery>
  <Version>1.1</Version>
  <Community>public</Community>
  <Range>
    <DiscoveryStart>10.52.224.0</DiscoveryStart>
    <DiscoveryEnd>10.52.224.255</DiscoveryEnd>
  </Range>
</Discovery>

Files

File	Description
nms.exe	The main executable.
alarm.wav	The alarm sound wave file, it should be less than 4 seconds.
icons.bmp	Icons for devices, in 4 colours, 32 x 32 pixels, can be extended.
rrdtool.exe	The round robin database for Windows. See http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
nms.htm	This Word document in HTML, which is also the help file.
nms_files	A directory with the images for the HTML documentation.
g<n>.png	The graph files produced by rrdtool.
P<ip>.rrd	Ping time database files, by IP address.
S<ip>-<int>.rrd	Traffic database files, by IP address and interface number.
Event.log	The file of event messages, updated when the program exits.
device.xml	The options and device information, stored when the program exits.
discovery.xml	The range of IP addresses for device discovery and the SNMP community name.

The program uses Ping, SNMP and Cisco CDP to discover devices and store information about the devices and the traffic.