[WEB4LIB] Web / Network monitoring software

[sean dreilinger]

greetings Eva (how was ILI/London?) & Web4Lib:

"O-Tech International, Ltd." wrote:
> Do you currently track the
> 'Traffic' on your library LAN / Internet connection
> - to check for security threats / limit legal liability

yes.

> - to view statistics on URLs, clients hosts, etc.

yes.

> My question is, what software/hardware do you use?  Or how do you do it?

presently with a mish-mash of freely available tools.

to check network and server security against known exploits,
misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, i like these two free tools:
  nessus: http://www.nessus.org/
  saint:  http://www.wwdsi.com/saint/

to monitor network traffic i combine visual MRTG reports generated from
SNMPd information. an SNMPd service runs on every computer and MRTG
collects updated information every 5 minutes -- on total network traffic
plus protocols of interest (to answer questions like ``how much of our
total network use is occupied by smtp email traffic versus version
control traffic versus web traffic?'')
  mrtg: http://www.mrtg.org/
  snmp: http://ucd-snmp.ucdavis.edu/

for web page traffic analysis, there are two free packages and one
commercial package i find very helpful, they are:
  nettracker: http://www.nettracker.com/
  webalizer:  http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/
  analog:     http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/

> Is this a product you would be interested in?

one product to accomplish all these things? it would be very interesting
-- would have to be a pretty graceful integration of all these
not-usually-combined functions, and THAT would be welcome (setting up
one well-thought-out application instead of multiple mini-projects).

wondering what you're up to with this :-)

--sean

--
mailto:sean at savvysearch.com                sean dreilinger, mlis
 http://www.savvysearch.com                http://durak.org/sean