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1. MRTG and monitoring. Set up MRTG and Netsaint on a Linux box, and charge for installation and tailoring. Think I'm kidding? I bought my first 4x4 almost completely with the money I made setting these things up - companies will be interested in them, if my experience is anything to go by. You'd be surprised!

2. Linux consulting. A lot of companies are running Windows servers that could easily be converted to boxes running Linux/Samba, FTP servers, and so on.

I belive that you're thinking of Netsaint...aren't you?

It's now called Nagios :-)

Nope. SATAN was a vulnerability probing tool that came out of SGI quite a while back. SAINT was based on it (at least in function, I don't know if the code was based on it). They have nothing to do with Nagios.

The previous version of Nagios was called Netsaint, but they changed the name to Nagios because of possible trademark problems with WebSAINT, which is a web based tool that uses SAINT.

From the notice at the bottom of netsaint.org: NetSaint is not affiliated with World Wide Digital Security, Inc. (WWDSI); Richard S. Carson and Associates, Inc; and the marks WEB SAINT, SAINT, SAINTWRITER, SAINTEXPRESS, and SAINTBASIC owned by Richard S. Carson and Associates, Inc.

And I may as well mention that Nagios/Netsaint is a really great tool and I highly recommend it. It won't, however, keep you up to date on "suspicious" activity - it's mostly for just making sure that your server and any services that run on it are going.

One area where open-source is doing great is in monitoring projects, such as Big Brother, NetSaint , Nagios, and others. I'm curious as to why you went with a commercial product instead of a free (as in beer and speech) one.

I use a program called netsaint to monitor the internal network.

They have a cool hack premade for what you need
http://www.netsaint.org/docs/hacks/hltherm.php

One of the most common problems I've encountered in my years as a systems administrator is poorly managed networks. If a network is designed without the presence of mind anticpating DoS attacks, then frankly, the victim company deserves *some* of the blame for the problem.

One mid-sized ISP I worked for had been operating for 5 years prior to my employ and the network operators had never heard of monitoring tools like MRTG, RRDTool, Netsaint or Big Brother etc etc!

"We do it to ourselves and that's what really hurts" -- Radio Head.

-- Steve.

Just thought i would add my input. I have been to allconet. I was a co-owner of a wireless isp in pa. DDG Wireless and we got to go down and spend a day with the guy who designed and maintains the system, Jeffry Blank. He was very nice and showed around the whole town, showed up all the network stuff.

Basically this all started because in maryland libraries can recieve a free T-1 i think it is. Basically Jeff started by hooking up some of the schools and stuff. Only charges for equipment, and like 10 bucks a year for maintenence..

Anyway. its a great system..Check out Allconet monitoring. they do not use custom software to monitor the network. They use Netsaint. Although Jeff is an avid contributor to the plugins for that. I use his check_breeze.pl and some others that he wrote.

All in all. if you get a chance go by and take a look. Its beautiful country and they Jeff is doing some amazing things with wireless.

Just goes to show what can be accomplished by not being a totaly money grubber.. heh.. some things that are cheap are good.

thanks

OpenView and Tivoli are for either very large budgets, or very large, distributed companies. NNM is pretty neat and all. It discovers your network for you, draws a really inaccurate map that you have to manually tweak. Then you find out that most of the features you want aren't part of NNM. You have to buy ITO (now called VantagePoint, IIRC). Then, you want to graph loads and network utilization. Guess what? Another $5-15k down the tubes. As far as I've been told Tivoli is the same way.

My point is that no matter which of those two you buy, you're going to need to do some substantial work to get them set up properly. Why not invest your time into something that is cheaper and, in most cases where you're monitoring
Where I work, I ousted OpenView and replaced it with NetSaint and Cricket. I also wrote a bunch of other CGI scripts to search my syslog archives and things of that nature. They aren't very difficult to maintain once you get the hang of it, and they're free.

If you're really set on something grand, I've been keeping an eye on OpenNMS which is more to the scale of NNM or Tivoli. Give their page a readover - they're nearing a 1.0 release, last I checked. Remember, you can always spend that cool million that's burning the hole in your pocket to hire the lead developer of one of those projects to come in to your company and 'Make it So.'

Good Luck!

The GPL violations are most likely just the straw that finally broke him. The other reasons you cite are probably at the core of the problem.

As the creator/developer of NetSaint (soon to be Nagios, I can understand where his frustration comes from. I've gone through several periods where I feel like just throwing in the towel and calling it quits. During those times I usually take 2 or 3 months to stop development, not respond to email, etc. and just relax. After a few months time I feel like starting up again at full swing. Granted, I've got a load of email and coding to catch up on (or to redirect to /dev/null) when I return, but its the only thing that has kept me going this far. For me I've always returned because:

• I felt I still had unfinished business in the project (TODO lists never die)
• I felt I had invested too much time in the project to simply quit and leave it all behind
• I didn't want to leave all the users out in the cold
• etc...

It also helps to develop an attitude of *not* wanting to help people at a certain point. If people are not reading the docs and always coming to me for help, I discard their support requests. References to the docs and mailing lists must be in a dozen places, but people just don't care to try things on their own. The only way you can survive in the long run is to leave these people to their own helplessness and concentrate on what you feel is important. If you loose sight of that, you're done for. Bad attitude, I know, but a necessary evil I think.

I realize that people always say that because a project is released under the GPL that others will step in and pick it up. I tend to question this attitude. People often don't realize what they're getting into when starting or taking over a project. I would guess most developers of popular GPL packages never thought their apps would require the amount of work that they do. Besides, having a mob of coders trying to have their way at making architecture decisions never got a project very far. Its a better bet that several forks of the project will emerge, each with a small number of leaders. Remember, meetings don't become more meaningful if you add more PHBs.

Netsaint I think netsaint i very cool. I.t checks for services in various network devices therefore reporting on uptime etc.. Sends out emails if one device goes down and so on. Very configurable. Love it, also ties in nicely with Cricket(link the devices with their respective cricket pages).A reporting tool for netsaint(Impress your boss!!)here

Cricket bases on rrdtool which is written by Tobi Oetikers(the guy who wrote MRTG. If you look at the rrdtool page you see various other frontends, I just happen to like cricket. Great for graphing routers and switches(and pretty much else) through snmp(you can configure it to graph other things, for example their is a package that creates graphs of the RTA's of devices in netsaint(look at the cricket contrib page.

ntop ntop, a sniffe with a web based interfaces(and a console one) were nice for monitoring various aspects of parts the network. Check out one of the newer cvs snapshots

I haven't had time to check out OpenNMS yet. Another nice tool is ethereal, a awesome gui sniffer.
One thing that is especially great about netsaint and cricket and netsaint is the great number of 3rd party addons, which make life a lot easier

You might want to give netsaint a look. It is more of a host monitoring tool, but numerous extensions have been developed for it, so it could be a good base to build upon or integrate with thing like OpenNMS.
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We use it at work to keep track of how often our hosted website and our NT servers are down. It is fairly easy to install, and configuration isn't too bad since there are lots of examples you can copy-n-paste. It is very stable, and the generated data is laid out in a fairly readable manner (definately understandable by non-techies.) You can even do email and pager alerts when a host or particular service goes down!

While we're mentioning monitoring software, I'll put in a blatant plug for NetSaint(www.netsaint.org) - a GPL'ed monitoring package for Linux and most all other *NIX OSes that I started about 2 years ago.

Anyway, detecting a "real" failure of network services (like POP, SMTP, etc) at a remote location (i.e. a popular website) is more difficult to do than most people may think. Since the remote host is serveral hops away from you, there are a number of potential breaking points in the network connection between you and the host.

Most monitoring software will tell you if the service is unavailable from your point of view, but this may not be accurate for the rest of the world. If you want to know whether or not a particular service like SMTP was really down on a remote host (and not just down/unreachable from your point of view), you'd need to have several locations from which you are doing the monitoring. Since you don't own/aren't in charge of the host in question, you probably won't be able to get a really accurate view of what's going on, unless you can place enough monitoring hosts around the 'net or peer with other people who are doing monitoring...

Big Brother System and Network Monitor NetSaint Network Monitor Network Monitor, Network Sniffer, Sniffer, IP Sniffer The Angel Network Monitor IPTraf - An IP Network Monitor Chesapeake's Network Monitor BigBen: Network Monitor Utility LG #28 ATM Network Monitor >> Brought to you by Google!

I think Netsaint deserves at least a nomination. It's an excellent network-monitoring tool that is very rapidly adding features and fixing bugs. I've been using it for months and have been very happy both with where it is and where it's going. Check it out.