README 2.5 KB

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  1. Welcome to softflowd, a flow-based network monitor.
  2. Introduction
  3. ------------
  4. softflowd listens promiscuously on a network interface and semi-statefully
  5. tracks network flows. These flows can be reported using NetFlow version 1, 5
  6. or 9 datagrams. softflowd is fully IPv6 capable: it can track IPv6 flows and
  7. export to IPv6 hosts.
  8. More details about softflowd's function and usage may be found in the
  9. supplied manpages, which you can view prior to installation using
  10. /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc softflowd.8 | less
  11. /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc softflowctl.8 | less
  12. If you are in need of a NetFlow collector, you may be interested in
  13. softflowd's companion project "flowd" (http://www.mindrot.org/flowd.html).
  14. flowd is a NetFlow collector that is maintained in parallel with
  15. softflowd and includes a few handy features, such as the ability
  16. to filter flows it receives as well as Perl and Python APIs to its
  17. storage format. NB. You don't have to use flowd: any NetFlow compatible
  18. collector should work with softflowd. An example Perl collector is included
  19. for testing purposes as collector.pl, but it doesn't yet support NetFlow v.9
  20. Installing
  21. ----------
  22. Building softflowd should be as simple as typing:
  23. ./configure
  24. make
  25. make install
  26. Unfortunately some systems like to make life complicated. Things work
  27. fine on the systems that I develop and test on (OpenBSD and Linux).
  28. There is peliminary support for Solaris 9 (i.e. it compiled), but no
  29. testing on this platform has been performed.
  30. Licensing
  31. ---------
  32. Softflowd is licensed under a two-term BSD license (see the source
  33. files for details). The code in sys-tree.h is Copyright Niels Provos
  34. <provos@citi.umich.edu> and comes straight from OpenBSD CVS, convtime.c
  35. comes is Copyright Kevin Steves and comes from OpenSSH (misc.c). Both
  36. of these files are licensed under two-term BSD licenses too. strlcpy.c,
  37. strlcat.c and closefrom.c also come from OpenBSD CVS and are Copyright
  38. Todd C. Miller. Please refer to the LICENSE file for full details.
  39. Reporting Bugs
  40. --------------
  41. Please report bugs in softflowd to http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/ If you
  42. find a security bug, please report it directly by email. If you have any
  43. feedback or questions, please email me:
  44. Contributing
  45. ------------
  46. Softflowd has an extensive TODO list of interesting features, large and
  47. small, that are waiting to be implemented. If you are interested in
  48. helping, please contact me.
  49. The latest source code may be obtained from Google Code:
  50. http://code.google.com/p/softflowd/
  51. Damien Miller <djm@mindrot.org>