I have set up a 10+ user network and I'm now trying to find a good way to monitor the performance of these users (uptime, etc.). My Fedora3 computer is on the LAN, but is not the router. How do I do this? I can install a different dist. if necessary. Also, pretend that I know very little about Linux, then pretend that you are not pretending.

Hi.

If the network is switched (it probably is), then you won't be able to monitor traffic from each machine. You could set up a script to ping each machine every few seconds to see if it's up, but that's about it. It is possible to find out a machine's uptime using TCP timestamps, using tcpdump, but you have to know what operating system is running on each machine in order to convert the timestamp to a wall-time uptime.
Have a look here:
http://www.0xdecafbad.com/TCP-Timest...-Remotely.html
and here
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html

Dave

It's possible to get Windows machines (I'm assuming the network consists of Windows machines...) to report events to the syslog demon which will be running on your Linux machine too.

You'll have to buy some software to do it though.
http://www.adiscon.com/Common/en/Art...-From-Unix.php

If the machines on the network are Linux machines, then they can already do this and would just have to be configured to send logs to your machine.

Dave

Perhaps I used the wrong words. I want to be able to see when each computer's network connection is lost, not computer uptime. They are all running XP. I don't know if this will actually change my possible options. Right now, I am running an XP program called Look@LAN, which pings each address in an IP range every 10 minutes to see what is connected. It can also make reports showing when each connection was on and off during a week (for example). However, it crashes more than you can imagine, and is pretty annoying, so I would like to find something similar, but without crashing.

Jason

You can use 'nmap' to do this.

If you do 'nmap -sP 192.168.0.0/24' it will scan 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.254, and tell you what IPs respond. This could be scripted to run every few minutes, and a log file created.

Dave

Thanks, that's perfect.

Jason