Well I am exhausted......and the Flowscan is working. First thing I can say about Flowscan is that the documentation is lacking......but the program is wonderful. I would highly suggest this tool if you are in the business of caring for a network.
I did end up using a harddrive installation of Knoppix 3.3 however, I downloaded the *.tar.gz files and built them in place rather than using the apt-get, with prebuilt .deb packages. This setup was truly a journey........ Beware the ConfigReader perl module.......the apt-get installation doesn't work, the make install doesn't work, in fact the cpan shell installation doesn't work either, it was apparently built for RH7.2 but all bets are off after that, it seems that the Makefile.pl is missing and the perl include directly is in a different place. The solution is to figure out what your perl include directory is....../usr/share/lib for me, I think .....and move a couple of files to that location. Over the last few years, I have been a Linux cheerleader but have functionally used Linux as a hobby OS; certainly from time to time it has been my primary desktop but due to my lack of knowledge, I always kept another machine close by "just in case". This being the case, I have gotten very good at installing various distributions and setting things up for a comfortable desktop experience.......ie. simple stuff. Email, usenet groups, wirelss, vpn, printers, samba......things that the desktop user would need. Yes, I have provided support for web, db servers in an enterprise environment but hell, once its set up correctly it just doesn't need that much attention, plus there was vendor support.....not a truly "get your hands dirty" experience. Ok...that is the setup.....and here is the thing; I have learned more in the last week and a half about the GNU/Linux environment that I have learned in the last 5 years. Having a project and being in charge of the entire thing from start to finish has to be one of the best ways to learn a system. I know that I have learned a LOT because what is so glaringly obvious to me at this moment is the VAST amount that I don't know. I leaned about user accounts, directory and file attributes, about ./configure, make, make install......and a lot of the switches that I never knew existed for them, and on and on and on. I'm going to make Flowscan my pet project for a while......I only implemented it in one of the very many ways that are available. There are several tools used for collecting the NetFlow information and several tools for graphing it. After I am comfortable that Flowscan is where I want it to be and I have scripted and cron'd most administrative tasks then I will begin work on either Rancid or OpenNMS. The next thing is to research more into the scripts that help manage the Flowscan "system"......I started the individual components via the command line as the packaged scripts didn't work......I'll attempt executing them on the command line one at a time on a test system to iron out what is and isn't working.......thus it will be very similar to my experience with researching how to install and "fire up" Flowscan......I think it required a total of three separate documents each of which preposed to be "installation guides" to collect all the information that was actually necessary. each left out things that we necessary to be successful at installation. If I have time, I'll try to put together an actual "complete" installation guide. One suggestion......don't assume that within a couple of hours of getting it working with two remote sites that you can add 169 additional sites and have it still work. Yes........I did this. Ouch. Damn, that hurts. I have 171 remote sites that I am interested in collecting Netflow info on as research for implementing QoS but some time needs to be put into "design" to accomplish such a task. I was collecting 6MB of data every five minutes.......yes, thats right.....72MB/hr, 1.7G/day, 12G/wk, 51G/mth, 622G/yr Wouldn't really work out that way due to holiday's weekends, etc. Quite a bit of work for a fancy MRTG box to use, huh? I will attempt to provide a complete description of the tool with screenshots at a future date........ I do very much suggest that this tool is invaluable.....this is not a simple MRTG website, I've used MRTG and I liked it, however Flowscan is like MRTG on steriods, with a Grad degree and an attitude. Cleve "still feel like a newbie, but not as much now" Allison p.s. Sorry about the run-on sentences, ranting, incoherent paragraphs, misspellings, etc....I'm bushed. GoodNight!
