Content-type: text/html Manpage of stakrate

stakrate

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 21-March-2004
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NAME

stak - Statistical Traffic Analysis Kit

SYNOPSIS

stakrate [-i <interface>] [-p <prefix>] [-s <snarflen>] [-r <n> | -g | -k] [-q <n>] [-lcvjx] [-X <expression> [-0 <c>]] [-b] [[-f] [filtering expression]]

DESCRIPTION

stakrate is a part of the Statistical Traffic Analysis Kit (STAK), which is a set of utilities designed to help an administrator to figure out what is happening in his network at the moment.

stakrate estimates current and average traffic rate (in bits and packets per second), as recorded on the given interface. The processed packets are subject to packet filtering, thus allowing to measure the HTTP traffic exchange rate, the TCP SYN packets rate, the number of packets per second containing the string 'HELO', et caetera.

USAGE

stakrate accepts parameters in a standard, short getopt(3) form.

There are several options concerning the stak sniffer framework, common for the all stak utilities - these options have been described in the GENERIC OPTIONS section below.

The remaining options, described in the TRAFFIC ESTIMATOR SPECIFIC OPTIONS are stakrate-specific and do not apply to other stak utilities.

After a successful startup, stakrate generates reports on recorded traffic rate:

: # stakrate -i eth5
=> Currently 4.15 MBps/11.28 kpps, Average: 4.15 MBps/11.28 kpps
=> Currently 4.09 MBps/11.60 kpps, Average: 4.11 MBps/11.41 kpps
=> Currently 3.98 MBps/11.49 kpps, Average: 4.06 MBps/11.42 kpps

Such an output means, that the current traffic rate on the eth5 interface (ie. the number of bytes received and sent on eth5) ranges from 3.98 to 4.15 megabytes per second, giving an average amount of 4.06 MBps. The first counter indicates the traffic rate recorded since the last output, while the second one shows the average rate recorded since the application startup.

The output could be presented in bit units if the user specifies the -b option:

: # stakrate -bi eth5
=> Currently 33.60 Mbps/11.76 kpps, Average: 33.60 Mbps/11.76 kpps
=> Currently 32.57 Mbps/11.41 kpps, Average: 33.00 Mbps/11.56 kpps

as well as in a more accurate form, without the SI prefixes, if the -v option was specified:

: # stakrate -vi eth5
=> Currently 4769195.00 Bps/12340.00 pps, Average: 4769195.00 Bps/12340.00 pps
=> Currently 4880502.49 Bps/12711.44 pps, Average: 4812985.07 Bps/12495.02 pps

Before actual counting is made, the packets might be filtered on a BPF-filter basis. For example, to measure received HTTP traffic, one could use:

: # stakrate -f 'dst port 80' -i eth5 -r 1

To measure traffic originating from the 192.168.0.0/16 subnet:

: # stakrate -i eth5 'src net 192.168.0.0/16'

As it can be noticed, the -f option indicator can be suppressed in case of stakrate. For more information on BPF filters, consult the tcpdump(1) manual.

GENERIC OPTIONS

-0 c: Replace every NUL character (ASCII 0) with c before doing regular expression based matching. Ignored if the -x option was not specified. The default is '@'.
-f f: BPF filter expression to use. Using this option causes stak to ignore any packets not matching the specified BPF filter expression. For a detailed description of BPF filter expressions syntax, consult the tcpdump(1) manual page.
-g: Signal-based report generation policy. The reports are dumped whenever stak receives a SIGUSR1 signal.
-h -?: Print help. stak dumps a short help on available command-line options and quits, regardless of other options.
-i I: Bind to interface I. The default is 'eth0', which of course will cause a failure on systems other than Linux. Make sure you specify the datalink prefix (see -p) when you order stak to bind to an interface of an uncommon type.
-k: Interactive report generation. The reports are dumped whenever data is available on the standard input, which usually means you'll have to press RETURN in order to generate a report.
-l: Make stdout line-buffered. This option is useful when reports are redirected (eg. using shell redirection) to a file.
-p N: Datalink layer header prefix length. Every (or at least almost every) known datalink layer protocol prefixes a packet with its own header - which has to be stripped before the actual data essential for stak (the IP protocol header) can be read. stak is able to determine automatically how many bytes to skip only for the most common datalink layer protocols (Ethernet, FDDI, TokenRing, loopback, PPP) - in other cases the prefix length must be specified using this option. It is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to set the right value - otherwise stak might print completely irrevelant reports and output invalid IP addresses. The default is autosense, or if that fails - 14 bytes, which is the length of an Ethernet header.
-q N: Orders stak to quit after outputting N reports.
-r N: Time-based report generation policy. The reports will be dumped on stdout every N seconds. This is the default (with N = 0.1).
-s N: Capture at least N bytes. For performance reasons, stak does not acquire the whole packet from network, it just reads and processes first N bytes. The default is 64 bytes, which might be not enough if you are using complicated BPF expressions or filtering the packets using a regular expression. In such cases, it is good to set the capture length to MTU on the interface. The value is automatically increased to at least 1500 (which is the default MTU for an Ethernet interface) if one of -x, -E or -T options is used. This option does NOT affect statistical data (amount of bytes, per-second byte rate) collected by stak - the accounted packet size is always the 'real' one.
-v: Print exact values. Normally, stak uses SI prefixes (like k - kilo, M - mega, G - giga, T - tera) to make the printed numeric values more attractive for a human being. The -v option disables this feature, causing stak to print exact values.
-x: Clear the screen before printing each report. This assumes your terminal is capable of understanding certain control sequences.
-X r: Regular expression-based filtering. This option will cause stak to ignore packets that DO NOT match specified regular expression. Before any tests, NUL characters occuring in a packet are replaced with an other character, as specified in the -0 option (the default is '@'). Consult regex(5) manual for a detailed description of POSIX regular expressions. In addition to standard regex syntax, you may use the \r (CR), \n (LF), \t (TAB), \\ (\) and \xNN (hex NN) special sequences.

TRAFFIC ESTIMATOR SPECIFIC OPTIONS

-b: Present output counters in bits per second in place of bytes per second.

AUTHOR

Mateusz Golicz <ziewk@jaszczur.org>

Feel free to send comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc. The author is not a native english speaker, and is aware of the fact that his english is far from perfect. Because of that, reports on grammar or vocabulary mistakes in this manual are also welcome.

The asynchronous DNS resolver part was taken from mtr - a very handy traceroute replacement by Matt Kimball.

LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. A copy of this license is distributed with this software in the file "COPYING".

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Read the file "COPYING" for more details.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 14:58:41 GMT, March 21, 2004