[NCLUG] Network configuration

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 04:30:52AM +0000, dobbster wrote:
>see your point.  I have no clue how much bandwidth our servers currently
>use.  Is there a simple traffic analysis tool I could use?

MRTG (see freshmeat.net) will generate pretty graphs of network usage
on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly scale. Very helpful until you run
some local backups over the net which causes a huge spike and your normal
data to drop off the bottom of the map...

You'll have to set up SNMP or get MRTG to read the data directly from
the specific network interfaces if you go that route though.

Apache can log the number of bytes sent in a request, which some stats
programs use to generate bandwidth usage graphs.

>Physical limitations might make that impossible, unless I keep the
>servers in my living area.  Could I instead put everything behind the
>firewall and just open up port 80?

Don't forget that to do this you will have to be clever.  Something like
set up a /30 network which has only the Cisco and the firewall on it,
then route the rest of the network to the firewall.  Otherwise, you get
the pleasure of mucking with ProxyARP (which works great, but makes my
head hurt when I have to set it up).

Sean
-- 
 "If all you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail."
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python