On Wed, 16 Nov 2011, Raymond Norton wrote:

> I am trying to help a member school get a handle on their Internet traffic.

Somewhat off-topic and a SUPER long-shot, but...

Almost (oh GOD) 20 years ago I was working for an ISP, we'd just got a new 
machine to be a dedicated web server because that whole internet thing was 
taking off, and the president of the company claimed he was getting bad 
response times. We tried telling him that if you're going to click Refresh 
20 times a second you MIGHT get some pages not loading but he wouldn't 
listen.

So we called the people who made the machine. A little outfit by the name 
of SGI.

They came in with one of their computers running their network analysis 
program. The thing sat on our network and gave a real-time graph of what 
protocols were using what bandwidth.

Now nevermind that the thing was beautiful and that you could use a camera 
to rotate the graph in 3D using actual hand gestures. It was incredibly 
USEFUL. To this day I've not seen an easy (i.e., foss) way to get 
real-time network traffic graphs like that. Granted, I haven't looked in a 
while, but hey.

Anyone know something like that?


If anyone's interested, it didn't show anything wrong with our webserver, 
but it DID show that smb was eating up the network. The SGI people and I 
agreed that this had nothing at all to do with anything, but in the finest 
Dilbert tradition it gave us something to point out to the PHB and say 
"Here you go, yell at the NT admin."


-Yaron

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