N E T S C A R F R E L E A S E 1.1 Hi all - In April, Merit received funding from the Resource Allocation Committee (RAC) to develop and evolve a prototype ISP Network 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. We expect about three more releases during the next 8 months, based on the feedback we get from the ISP and R&E community. The end result will hopefully be widely-available and consistent ISP performance data much as Merit produced during the operation of the NSFNET. The 1st public release of the software is now available at: http://www.merit.edu/~netscarf A technical overview article is being published in the July Connexions magazine (Vol. 10 No. 6) and some on-line docs exist at the above URL as well. The NetSCARF Code -------------------------- 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. The source and pre-compiled executables are available for each of these on the BSDi and SunOS platforms. 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 privacy (DES Encryption) facility, but this capability is disabled for the public release due to export restrictions. You do get the benefits of authenticated management communications with the released SNMPv2u code though.) Release 2 is scheduled for October and will include ports to Windows NT, AIX, and perhaps Solaris and LINUX. We are primarily customer-driven in choosing additional features, but our own experience so far leads us to adding a few features to release 2 including raw network statistics maintenance functions, raw data file compression, and another report or two. 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. There is a mailing list (netscarf@merit.edu) for community discussion and guidance. Details are available at the URL above. Cheers - Bill ---------------------------------------------------------------------- William Norton <wbn@merit.edu> (313) 936-2656