Hi Matthias,

In concept, and as documentation says, what you want to achieve is feasible and
your understanding of the classifier() is correct - you only have to write down
your own patterns: re-phrased, regular expressions are typically employed to
recognize protocols but they can be of course used to recognize virtual hosts
when in presence of text-based protocols (ie. HTTP, FTP or POP3). 

As you said this is quite innovative and interesting - so let me know if i can
support you somehow (feel also free to contact me privately). For now i have not
received any feedback which can help you dimensioning the solution - so can't
say how easy it would be to deploy in this sense; perhaps somebody reading can
fill this gap?

Cheers,
Paolo

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 09:20:45PM +0100, Matthias Pigulla wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I've recently set up pmacct for accounting and it works very well. However, 
> most of the traffic I'm seeing is HTTP for name-based virtual hosts. As the 
> page on classification says "traffic classification can result highly 
> beneficial for ... accounting and billing per application layer logical 
> entities (ie. virtual hosts)", I was wondering whether pmacct is capable of 
> sorting out traffic in my case.
> 
> It would have to inspect the "Host:" header sent during the beginning of a 
> http connection and classify traffic as "http" + the host name following the 
> header.
> 
> The README.developers file from the classifiers example files describes 
> char protocol[] = "<something>"
> as a static value. As I understand it, when the classifier() function returns 
> 1, it means that the flow belongs to that protocol. I think in my case the 
> value would need to change with each successful classification.
> 
> Do you think it would easily be possible to extend pmacct to reflect this? I 
> think it would be a great feature if one could measure IP traffic for virtual 
> hosts sharing an IP address.
> 
> Thanks a lot!
> Matthias

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