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Peep: The Network Auralizer

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the fun-ways-to-torture-your-ears dept.

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?

9 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. How about using sounds as FEEDBACK instead by DickBreath · · Score: 5

    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.
  2. Chernobyl found that audible alarms are bad by dustpuppy · · Score: 4
    ... showed that using tones for status information was a very effective method for important (but non-critical) information.

    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.

    1. Re:Chernobyl found that audible alarms are bad by remande · · Score: 4
      Done well, audible alerts for critical information is very useful. The US Military has a system lovingly referred to as "Bitchin' Betty", and other militaries (notably Russian) have similar systems. Besides simple audibles (the "tone" of missile lock-on most of us learned from Top Gun), the military has found that a verbal warning system helps in emergency situations. For example, the Betty system calmly reports "altitude...altitude" when you fly below a certain altitude. My guess is that this is especially useful when dealing with groggy pilots just coming out of G-LOC. You wake up, hear someone saying "altitude...altitude..." and you pull up before your eyes and frontal lobes start working again.

      The following is funny, but I am not making this up. The military had some think tanks working on the Betty system, and determined that (predominantly male) pilots react quickest to a female voice. Not a sultry female voice, just a female voice. Thus, it's not "Bitchin' Billy". It also happens that they determined that, the stronger the language, the faster the response.

      They chose not to use that last bit of information in the Betty system. This was mostly because said think tankers didn't want to explain to Congress why they were spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to have the plane shout "Pull up, you $(&*@#!"

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      --The basis of all love is respect

  3. A pleasure to diagnose... by nakaduct · · Score: 5
    Since I'm on call, I'm looking forward to my first conversation with a monitoring guy after this is in place...

    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

  4. Yes, but.. by multipartmixed · · Score: 4

    ..if some spam-mail gets routed to /dev/null, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?

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    --

    Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
  5. Site Slashdotted! by Dannon · · Score: 5

    Mr. Gilfix musta just heard a whole mega-flock of owls....

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    --
    Good judgment comes from experience.
    Experience comes from bad judgment.
  6. About time by TheAncientHacker · · Score: 5

    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.

  7. Snoop by drsoran · · Score: 4

    Snoop (Solaris, IRIX, etc.) has the wonderful feature:
    -a Listen to packets on /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).

    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. ;-)

  8. Backup peep site by mcarbone · · Score: 5

    Well, seeing that the site is slashdotted, you can find it here for now:

    http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/peep/download.html

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    The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe