Slashdot Mirror
Peep: The Network Auralizer
Manuka writes "I have just returned from LISA 2000 in New Orleans (it was a blast), where Michael Gilfix of Tufts University presented a best-of-LISA paper on his creation, called Peep. This has got to be one of the coolest networking tools I've seen - it generates sound events based on network traffic. Really neat stuff like a bird chirping when mail comes in, or an owl hooting when your web server dishes up a page (you can actually use any sound for any event). Neat little way to generate background noise, and you can see (hear) what the network is up to and if it's doing anything weird - if the owl sounds like it's on speed, you're being slashdotted, or if the birds sound a little too hitchcockian, you're being spammed. " But what is the sound of one cracker scanning?
You can find it here as well (not sure if this is the most recent version though):
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Am I the only one who remembers the sysadmin who hooked the output of ping(1) into a text-to-speech program, turned his speakers up to full, and started pinging a machine at the other end of the building?
"PING... PING... PING..." on each successfully returned packet.
He then started wandering the halls, tweaking cables. When he bumped a cable and the noise stopped coming from his office, he knew he had found the fault. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'm in the middle of doing a computer speech mini-project at my company. After many, many times of going down to the computer room and finding printers jammed and communications errors unchecked due to our operators not hearing the warning beeps over the noise of the computer room, we came up with a solution.
We were in desperate need of re-writing our network/database/communications monitoring software, so I figured...why not add voice to it? So I added a soundcard and speakers to the new system, and used some text-to-speed software. Result? Pissed off operators!
Printer alert! Printer 1 is jammed!
Communications alert! Dialer 2 is hung!
Printer alert! Printer 2 is out of paper!
Oh well...at least the printer's don't sit around jammed for more than 1 minute now =)
Okay, maybe it's slightly more useful than that -- but it's usually not necessary or even helpful. If you are scrolling, the really useful feedback is the fact the window is scrolling. Or the button is depressed, or whatever. I haven't found that sound adds anything useful to that.
The nice thing about a sense that's entirely seperated from vision, is that it can be used for something entirely unrelated to what you are looking at. The sound I hear when walking down the street doesn't effect my understanding of what I see very much -- I can see the street and the other people just fine. But I can hear things going on outside my field of vision and my field of attention, and that can be very useful (for instance, if I hear someone walking up behind me).
Sound seems to be particularly appropriate for background events. People are very good at filtering it out -- I can be on a train and listen to one person over the sound of the train and other people's conversation. But if someone else says my name -- even though I'm actively listening to something else -- I will notice that. That's really pretty damned impressive when you think about it, and yet a nearly universal skill.
If you've used a recent Mac OS, you'll notice it has the options to make sounds that reinforce what you're doing.
For instance, whenever you're scrolling, there is a "scrolling" sound. Very soft and subtle -- but continuous for as long as you're holding down the mouse button. There is a "window dragging" sound. Again, soft and subtle. But it strongly reinforces what you're doing. Grab the scroll-thumb and drag it rapidly, and the sound changes to match.
Using sounds to notify you of very frequent, non-user initiated, events, such as web server hits (or on some systems, frequent events, such as blue screens), seems to be potentially annoying.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Great, Now I can apply themes to my network
The emphasis is on 'non-critical'. I recall that an investigation into the Chernobly nuclear disaster pointed to audible alarms as one of the contributing factors. Basically, when the reactor started malfunctioning, so many alarms were going off that the techs were unable to identify which was the most important alarm and hence they didn't respond appropriately to the situation.
I would prefer a utility that created a crying advertiser sound every time my proxy server nailed an incoming cookie.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I posted about this (or at least it was a tangent in a post about something else) a few days ago. A friend of mine wrote a perl script to moniter the ipmon-generated output of his OpenBSD firewall. When teh script recognized common script kiddie scans, it would play an mp3 of a ripe melon hitting a board (or a board hitting a ripe melon, either way a rather satisfying, moist thunk), represent a kiddie fruitlessly hitting his/her head against the firewall.
(Common scans like the port 135-140 range of MSFT shit, that sort of thing.)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
This is precisely the reasoning behind the project. I encourage everyone to read the paper; it's a far more complicated piece of software than is being suggested here with the usual 'snoop -a' and 'cat foo.au > /dev/audio' responses.
ObPlug: Tufts University is looking to fill positions for sysadmins with developer tendencies to work on this and similar bleeding-edge projects. We presented two papers at LISA this year. Please email me for details.
MG: "Yeah, there's a problem with system XYZ..."
Me: "How so?"
MG: "Well, usually is goes 'ree-ree-tinktinktinktink', you know? But right now it's going 'ree-ree-tinktink-bong-bong-tink'!"
Me: "Is that 'bong' like a doorbell chime, or more like a big chinese gong?"
MG: "In between but more like a gong, I think."
Me: "Well, shit."
cheers,
mike
..if some spam-mail gets routed to /dev/null, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
--
Mr. Gilfix musta just heard a whole mega-flock of owls....
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
This post hit it on the money. Peep is based on this very idea. Something to note for all of you: Peep doesn't use beeps or tones, but mixes together sounds that occur in natural environments to create sound "ambiances". The point behind Peep was to create an audio interface that was pleasing to listen to, as well as informative. Hence the reason why we avoided beeps =) Peep also does some other stuff that's non-trivial such as using auto-discovery and leasing to manage distributed clients. I encourage people to read the paper because there's a lot of thought behind the psychology of how it works and how we can provide a large amount of information in a compact and easy to digest way. Just my heads up =)
NASA did a study back in the '60s that showed that using tones for status information was a very effective method for important (but non-critical) information. This technique was used on the Apollo program. After a while the normal sounds become part of the background noise but when something changes, the brain picks up on it very quickly. It has the advantage that the human does it as a background task.
Snoop (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) has the wonderful feature: /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).
;-)
-a Listen to packets on
I've heard of someone nearly strangling their officemate though after they left it running on their system while they were out of the office all day. Talk about driving you nuts. Definitely NOT birds chirping or owls hooting.. more like screeching.
They set it up such that an explosion would sound every time someone downloaded a copy of Netscape when they released 0.9 (I think that was the version). It's described somewhere on JWZ's page.
Well, seeing that the site is slashdotted, you can find it here for now:
http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe