nProbe

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Say hello to NetFlow-Lite (NFLite)
As you all know, NetFlow has been initially designed for routers (or L3 switches if you wish), contrary to sFlow that instead has been deployed mostly on switches. In this view, people use NetFlow just for monitoring internet traffic, as NetFlow is not supported across the product portfolio due to dedicated ASIC required. NetFlow-lite (first introduced with Catalyst 4948E) bridges the gap by providing a lightweight solution that allows capturing of important flow information through packet sampling mechanisms combined with the extensibility of NetFlow version 9 and IPFIX. What is NetFlow-Lite? In …
nProbe

Cisco(Live) and ntop
Just like Apple is the computer brand I use since 1985, for me Cisco is the networking company, the one that created the first routers and switches on which the Internet was built. It has been a great surprise when last summer I have been contacted by a Cisco representative, who has asked me whether I was interested in starting a new project on NetFlow. After the initial surprise, of course I have accepted, and now it’s a few months I work with (not for) Cisco on this nice and challenging …
nProbe

HTTP Traffic Analysis Using nProbe and Scrutinizer
Are you interested in getting URL information from NetFlow?  The nProbe NetFlow probe or the nBox can do it.  Paul at Plixer International recently wrote a blog on Recommended nProbe Templates.  For a foundation on this topic, check out his blog.  As an extension of his blog, I’ll explain how to get URLS from the nProbe. Scrutinizer from Plixer is the ideal tool for advanced IPFIX reporting and network traffic analysis. Below is a top domain report. For our company, the first page of this report is usually legitimate sites, …
nProbe

How to Configure nProbe to Export URLs and Latency via NetFlow
Our friends at Plixer have written a nice article about how to use nProbe to export HTTP and latency information. Note that you can also use the nProbe http plugin to trace HTTP events and rebuild user sessions. This as netflow is not exactly the best protocol to use for exporting this information. The available options are: --http-dump-dir <dump dir> …
nProbe

Using ntop as a flow collector for nProbe
nProbe is an efficient netflow/IPFIX probe that can also act as a collector dumpling flows on disk or onto a database (MySQL, sqlite and Fastbit). As ntop has not been designed to operate on large/fast networks, it’s possible to use nProbe as pre-processor. In this configuration, nProbe captures packets from a network interface (or collects flows on a socket), computes flows based on packets, and sends them to ntop. Thus ntop acts as a flow collector. Supposing to: receive packets to account/analyze on interface eth1 of host X start ntop …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe v6
Today the new nProbe v6 has been released. It includes several improvements with respect to the previous version including: Full IPFIX support: PEN (Private Enterprise Numbers) and Variable length encoding. Ability to natively dump flows in FastBit format that allows to outperform relational and raw flow-based collectors. Ability to collect sFlow flows and turn them into flows (v5/v9/IPFIX). Collection of Cisco ASA flows and conversion in ‘standard’ flows. New nprobe architecture for better performance and exploitation of multicore architectures. Support of tunneled (including GRE, PPP and GTP) traffic and ability to export in flows inner/outer envelope/packet information. …
nProbe

nProbe Internals
nProbe is an efficient processing engine able to produce flows based on captured packets, converts flow format (e.g. from NetFlow v5 to v9), or from sFlow to NetFlow. Its engine is fully extensible by means of plugins, and it can handle many application-level protocols. This short document gives an overview of the nProbe internals and it describes the nProbe plugins structure. …
nProbe

Using Genetic Algorithms for Network Intrusion Detection and Integration into nProbe
Conference: OSCON 2010 Presentation Link: Ignite Track Presented by: Brian Lavender SNORT is popular Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) tool that currently uses a custom rule based system to identify attacks. This presentation emphasizes on writing the algorithm to write generate the rules through GA and the integration of them into nProbe, a similar network monitoring tool written by Luca Deri with a plug-in architecture. Genetic Algorithms are dependent upon identifying attributes to describe a problem and evolving a desired population. In this case, the problem is an attack through the …
nProbe

nProbe with FastBit database: an innovative flows storage solution
nProbe, acronym for NetFlow probe, is an open-source probe that supports both NetFlow and sFlow collection. It has been designed to keep up with Gigabit speeds on commodity hardware and it can be used for capturing packets and analyzing networks at full speed with no (or very moderate) packet loss using PF_RING. Each captured packet is analyzed, associated to a flow record, and periodically, the expired flows are emitted and exported to the specified collectors. nProbe is fully inter-operable with commercial collectors and open source tools such as ntop. The …
nProbe

IANA Assigned a PEN to ntop
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has assigned to ntop the 35632 PEN (Private Enterprise Number) number. This means for instance that nProbe extensions (e.g. HTTP and VoIP traffic monitoring) will be exported using IPFIX using a valid template that will be recognized by all flow collectors available in the market. A side effect is that whoever will use ntop/nProbe to monitor its own network or code monitoring extensions will be able to export them using a uniform template that will be handled by all applications. This is a major step …
nProbe

Collection and Exploration of Large Data Monitoring Sets Using nProbe
Collecting and exploring monitoring data is becoming increasingly challenging as networks become larger and faster. Solutions based on both SQL-databases and specialized binary formats do not scale well as the amount of monitoring information increases. This paper presents a novel approach to the problem by using a bitmap database that allowed the authors to implement an efficient solution for both data collection and retrieval. The validation process on production networks has demonstrated the advantage of the proposed solution over traditional approaches. This makes it suitable for efficiently handling and interactively …

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