Hi all - In April, Merit received funding from the Resource Allocation Committee (RAC) to develop and evolve a prototype ISP Statistics Collection And Reporting Facility (NetSCARF) package. The basic idea is to make it dead easy for ISPs to collect and report data about their part of the Internet. The end result will hopefully be widely-available Internet performance data much as Merit produced during the operation of the NSFNET. The NetSCARF code is easy to install, runs automatically, and consists of four separate programs. Every fifteen minutes the collections program queries all network nodes in parallel. (This is especially important for large networks where the serial skew can affect the ability to correlate data.) Nightly these raw statistics get pre-processed (cooked). The cooked data is delivered to CGI scripts using what we think is the first Public Domain implementation of the OpStats (rfc1856) client/server model. Finally, ISP performance reports (based on the cooked data) are displayed on the web via the CGI scripts. We plan on making the source and pre-compiled executables available for each of these. SNMP Version 1 is used to query the network nodes, although the code includes support for the User Security (USEC) model for SNMPv2. ( The Routing Arbiter project will use the DES Encrytion facility, but this capability will be disabled for the public release due to export restrictions. ) During the operation of the NSFNET we found there were really only three graphs that were widely seen as useful. The first cut of the code includes only these three most popular graphs: System UpTime, Interface Uptime, and the McD's chart (total packets served) by the network. Alpha Testers? -------------- The first release of the code will be made around July 1, and we currently have a version of the code that runs on SunOS 4.1.4, BSDi, and AIX systems. We are looking for a couple of ISPs to try the code out and provide early feedback. If you operate one of these Unix varieties and have the time to work with us, please e-mail your name, daytime phone #, operating environment, and a description of your network (size, types of routers, etc.) to netscarf-team@merit.edu with the subject line "ALPHA TESTER". The code doesn't require much - just disk space, a network attachment, and a few CPU cycles periodically. Please see me at the NANOG if you have any questions or suggestions. More information about the NetSCARF project (including the text of the proposal) is available on-line: http://home.merit.edu/~wbn/RAC/play.html Bill ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- William Norton <wbn@merit.edu> (313) 936-2656