Nfdump and Nfsen

It is been a while, since I my last post, but I definitely been very busy with some great tools and techniques. One of these tools or maybe I have to say one set of tools have surprised me. It is the combination of NFDump and NFSen, it is really cool to see how the traffic is going through the router and which session that there are made. The only unpleasant thing about this tool that it was a bit of a puzzle to set it up. So after some puzzling (is this the English word??) I found out how to set up an sFlow deamon, cause I’m working with Procurve switches and they only support sFlow. But the text-only display of NFDump is nice and has definitely some great value, but I want graphics, cool looking pictures. I want to impress people when I say; “look, this is how the traffic looks of our network” :-). Here comes NFSen and it does a great job so from now on, I can say to people if they complain or point there finger to the network, “look it definitely wasn’t the network”. And even that most of the end-user don’t know what they are looking at, they will agree that it couldn’t be the network.

A little side note; if people complain about the network or speeds, you have to solve it and keep all the possibilities open, so you may not exclude the network, because it has some cool pictures. For the Dutch readers, I’ve made a small howto NFDump & NFSen in Dutch, for the English users, I will translate it, but can’t say exactly when. So if you have questions or just want already the Dutch howto, just ask! 29 december 2008: Sorry totally forgot to attach the Dutch manual, but here it is. 23 February 2009: As requested here is quick translation of the Dutch manual in English.