It is very easy to make money. It is very easy to create a software product.
It is also easy to sell on the Internet. Okay? Do as I say. Don't ask me why I am poor and unsuccessful. I am only good at giving practical advice that works. Netflow is a Cisco standard for measuring the traffic flows in a network. By that I mean your LAN. Nowadays packet traffic determine how busy your hotel business is. Think of a hotel. 100s of tables, 4 at each and 10 waiters. Food is being served. Plates are cleaned. And people walk to wash their hands. Also cash is collected and change given. People move around carrying the "business". In the software equivalent, this happens using packets. In your LAN, say college LAN some are playing games, some watching p0rn, some watching some youtube movie, some reading up , some playing with network protocols. Netflow gives you a way to instrument a node in your network, say your router or firewall to passively identify the traffic patterns, how many packets are coming in from Noda A to Node B, how many going out, which protocol and so on. SNMP or simple network management protocol is used to query a network entity that runs an SNMP server or agent to report the various system statistics. But netflow has nothing at all to do with SNMP. Netflow passively measures the traffic flows. And tells you which IP address is using up how much bandwidth and for how long. It is a really cool tool. SNMP works differently. You have managers and agents and you query every node to know which processor, how much RAM, what disk usage is there and of course, how many network interfaces are there, what their usages are etc. SNMP may or may not be enabled. It works by querying. But netflow will tell you everything by just running a netflow daemon, a collector that sits in the node that sees all the packets in your network. Typically a forwarder like your default gateway. And once you have to data, then what? Create graphs, tell the sys admin that you have to provision more bandwidth or block p2p traffic and so on. It is a really fantastic forensic and educational tool to study your demographics. What does this have to do with money making? Well Zoho has been making money using this technology and many others. They created useful dashboards, they created useful tools to collate the data, to visually represent and analyze this. Despite there being 100s of free tools they are able to make money. Why? People pay money for convenience. When they don't have to work hard. Almost all open source tools require you to work a little bit to see pretty graphs of netflow. There you go. Products don't have to be made from scratch. You can piggyback on a really good concept. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
