8/11    Can anyone recommend a good network monitoring program?  We have
        multiple Sun Servers and a buncha PC's, on a 100-BaseT subnet.
         \_ mrtg?
    \_ Memorize References to Tron Game?
               \_ look it up on google
        \_ What exactly are you going to monitor?
           \_ Would like to pinpoint any problem areas, slowness,
              lack of response, highest use, etc.
                \-sounds you want to monitor the network, not monitor *over*
                the network, in which case ping, traceroute etc. are not
                what you want. mrtg is pretty nice and has a lot of uses.
                but to answer your question: if you want to be serious about
                this, you get to get someone who really understands this
                stuff and is well-briefed about your network topology, your
                priorities and other local conditions. too many people spend
                lots of money on these big industrial strength solutions like
                sun net manager or that hp open whatever when a halfway clueful
                person can cobble something together from free stuff that meets
                your needs better. but they have to know exactly what you
                want to monitor. it is a very different matter to continuously
                watch for suspicious stuff security-wise vs. once a week snap-
                shots for capacity planning to have off-line stuff in place
                that can be quickly brought online to diagnose things. it is
                a differnt problem to get exact info about one "class c" vs.
                get 95% accurate info about a couple of classBs, but to be able
                to get it really fast, also depends whether you have privilaged
                acess to routers, whether you are worried about denial of
                service [a realy problem with a lot of monitoring setups] --psb
                service [a real problem with a lot of monitoring setups] --psb
              \_ is it all one ethernet?  how many routers you got?
        \_ Sorry to be anal, but ping, traceroute and snmpwalk work
           for me.
                \_ ping and traceroute are practically useless for
                   monitoring a local network.  -tom
                   \_ Depends on the size and subnetting. We use
                      ping, traceroute and snmpwalk with some homebrew
                      perl/java cgi frontends for managing/maintaining
                      our heavily switched/routed lab nets at cisco.
                        \_ gee, if it's switched and routed it's not local.
                           \_ local to me means everything on my side of the
                              BFR (I mean 12000 GSR). If you think local
                              all on the same switch, I beg to differ. I
                              might agree for all on the same VLAN.