Thanks for looking.

I am looking for a new command line tool to add into my Linux arsenal of trubleshooting.

I often monitor LAN/WAN traffic and sometimes, the big solutions come into play, like nagios and other client/server setups. Sometimes however, I can't go installing lots of packages on some systems so need to rely on those nifty cool command line tools I can quickly yum or apt-get install to achieve similar results. The majority is the systems are debian BTW.

My favorite tool is mtr to get some idea of the path to a server then maybe some other tool to see how bandwidth is doing. I often have to find problems over dedicated circuits for example. Using mtr and it's reporting function is great but it lacks long term current and historical details.

I need something I can start from the command line, leave it running, letting it spew out ongoing stats without taking up a ton of network resources or upsetting some IT people because I am sending huge amounts of ICMP or other traffic to them. Being able to change the ports instead of using ICMP related ports would be killer.

Maybe I could log into the Linux box to check the results or even have them emailed to me so I can take a look when I have a minute. Something which won't spew out gigs of data but would let me collect averages, store them into a file and keep on storing those averages so that maybe I could take a look at the overall results in a weeks time or something.

The usual things are what I am looking for such as packet times, latency, hop changes, even bandwidth if I could do it without getting anyone upset by using which ever ports I need.

I've been looking around for days and maybe I've missed some important results so I thought I might ask here and see if some of the guru's might have some thoughts on this.

If you do, it certainly is much appreciated and thanks for your time!

'screen' or 'tmux' can be used if you want to keep something running even after you log out. Using those, you can "daemonize" almost any cmd line utility.

But going to the main part of your question:

I'll rattle some off. Maybe you'll get lucky and I'll list one you haven't tried yet.

ping (with command line options, ping can be more passive. For instance, -i sets the interval)
netstat
iptraf (in debian repo but not installed by default)
nmap

Familiar with all of the tools you mentioned so I sure appreciate the input but none do what I'm looking for.

Why can't you use Nagios remotely on those hosts? You would only need to load a few packages (NRPE, sensors, and some SNMP packages-IIRC, it's about 4 total packages for RHEL 5/6).

Then you have everything you are looking for...centralized collection of data, command-line tools on the remote host, and it's daemonized.

Much like mtr is your favorite, Nagios happens to be mine

I agree that nagios is a great solution but this is for when I am at a customer site or helping someone in the field where I cannot install a number of packages.

I was also thinking that maybe there is something which I could pipe mtr output into which might give me what I need. I could even send the mtr output to something on my own network where I don't have such limitations, where I could process the mtr output into something more meaningful over time.

I don't consider 4 package a large number of packages, and for remote installs, I just had a tarred file with the required RPMs for the given distro in it.

You should stick with MTR and just daemonize it/fg/screen/etc.

>I don't consider 4 package a large number of packages, and for remote installs, I just had
>a tarred file with the required RPMs for the given distro in it.

I agree but sometimes, I simply can't install anything other than basic tools.
Like I said, I was hoping that maybe I could send the output to another package on a server where I could install anything I wanted.

>You should stick with MTR and just daemonize it/fg/screen/etc.[/QUOTE]

I have not once read that it could be daemonized? That's interesting. Can you expand on this?

Understood on the first point, just thought I'd mention it.

As for your second-the first reply to your thread, above describes some ways to "daemonize" (perhaps I should have used quotes?) mtr. Put it in the bg and log out, use screen and break your session, etc.

Ah, I understand now. Yes, that could actually be done. I'm not sure however that it spews out any reports until it's done running. I don't think it has any live output because it's meant to be used for pretty much real time situations.

I did read that there is another one called mtr-tiny which doesn't have the console functions.
So far, I've found nothing which gives similar output so still looking.