wipl - Maintain and display statistics based on packets seen by a network card.

The wipl program package consists of several programs:

wipld This is a daemon program. The program maintains statistics based on packets seen by a network card. These statistics can be read, modified and displayed by the clients described below.

To be more precise, the daemon program creates a shared memory area. The area contains a table indexed either by MAC or IP addresses. In a typical setup all netcards which sends or receives data on the LAN segment the computer running wipld is connected to, will end up having an entry in this table. For each entry in the table a user specified number of counters are saved.

The user has to write a small program and give it to the daemon. This program must be written in a special language which is called the wipl programming language, see wipllang(5). This program is executed for each packet seen by the network card and it will usually update one or more counters. Typically the counters are updated in a way that make them indicate how much the cards have transmitted and received through a router or server.

wiplc This is a client program for wipld. It can display tables containing the values of selected counters. It can be instructed to print a new table on a regular time interval and can write text, XML and HTML files. The values it displays can in fact be the result of evaluation of arbitrary expressions. This, for example, allows it to display the speeds by which the counters are incremented or decremented.

wiplcSimple This is the wiplc from the 991008 release of wipl. This program is much less flexible and more obscure than the new wiplc program. But you find might it easier to use than wiplc for outputting simple tables.

redtable.cgi A simple cgi script. It can modify the statistics written by wiplc so that the line describing the retreviewing machine is colored red.

wiplcExec This is a client program for wipld. It can be be used to execute programs written in the wipl programming language.

For example, this can be used to modify or print all or some counters. Or it can be used to remove cards which has not been updated for some period from the statistics.

wiplcInetd This is a client program for wipld. It is meant to be called from the standard inetd daemon. It is used by the wiplJava applet. On request it will tell connecting clients the values of the counters associated with the client.

wiplJava.jar A Java applet which can connect to a machine running wipld and which has wiplcInetd installed. It will display information about the counters it reads.

You need to have System V IPC installed in your kernel in order to use this program package.

This release of the package is currently only tried compiled on a Redhat Linux 6.0 and a Debian slink system.

Make the daemon reread configuration on a HUP signal.

Make the daemon print error messages during startup to stderr and not only to the logfile.

Make wiplc write nicer-looking HTML pages and maybe even make some dynamic graphics. And make it write more usefull XML pages. See more on the wiplc man page.

Make it possible to refer to counters by name and not just by number.

Make a better wiplJava program an maybe a new extended wiplcInetd program to support it. And maybe port wiplJava to native the Windows and/or X-Windows platform.

Make a new datatype and new functions which uses IP addresses when in IP mode and MAC addresses when in MAC mode.

Christian Worm Mortensen, <cworm@it-c.dk>

Please sent bug reports, patches, enhancements, suggestions and comments.

wipld(8), wiplc(1), wiplcSimple(1), wiplcExec(1), wipllang(5), wiplcInetd(8), ipcs(8), inetd(8)