Secure Network Monitoring
Nettest is a secure, real-time network monitoring utility. The nettest framework is
designed to incorporate existing and new network tests, and be run as a daemon or an
interactive process. Requests for network tests are received via a SSL connection or the
user interface and are authorized using an ACL list (in the future authorization using
Akenti will also be supported).
For tests that require coordination between the two ends of the test, nettest establishes an
SSL connection to accomplish this coordination. A test between two remote computers
can be requested via the user interface if the nettest daemon is running on both remote
machines and the user is authorized. Authorization for the test is through a chain of trust
established by the nettest daemons. Nettest is responsible for determining if the test request
is authorized, but it does nothing further to secure the test once the test is running.
Currently the nettest framework incorporates Iperf-v1.2, a simple ping type test, and a
tuned TCP test that uses a given required throughput and ping results to determine the
round trip time to set a buffer size (based on the delay bandwidth product) and then
performs an Iperf-v1.2 TCP throughput test. Additional network test tools can be integrated
into the nettest framework in the future.
Nettest runs on Solaris and Linux.
The following additional packages are needed: