NAME:
  pmacct (Promiscuous mode IP Accounting package) v0.7.4
  pmacct is Copyright (C) 2004 by Paolo Lucente


DESCRIPTION:
  pmacct is a set of network tools to gather IP traffic informations (bytes
  counter and number of packets); aggregation of statistics is done using
  simple primitives (MAC addresses, VLAN IDs, source host, destination host,
  ports and IP protocols) that can be used alone or combined together to form
  complex aggregation methods; support for historical counters breakdown,
  packet tagging to allow either load-balanced or distributed counters and
  packet sampling. Data is either stored in a memory table, pushed to stdout
  or in a SQL database (MySQL or PostgreSQL). Gathering packets off the wire
  is done either using pcap library (and promiscuous mode of the listening
  interface) or reading Netflow packets coming from the network.

  IP accounting is the key for a range of operations like billing, pricing
  models application, live or historical traffic analysis; it is also a valuable
  way to go for handling network thresholds or bandwidth management. Taking SNMP
  data from physical or virtual interfaces of network equipments sometimes
  is not too useful because of coarse granularity of counters.
  Finer granularities are reached if counters match useful logical entities
  (such as Autonomous Systems, departmental networks, specific traffic flows,
  etc.).

  Many network equipments already support redirection of network traffic to a
  replication port; here, non-blocking architectures help in not negatively
  affect global performances and usual routing or forwarding operations when
  mirroring data. Alternatively, some equipments support export protocols (like
  Cisco's Netflow) to describe traffic flows.
  Both approaches, traffic mirroring and export protocols, leave new chances
  to do IP accounting online (but not inline), off critical paths. New opportunities
  arise for advanced data manipulation or post-processing activities.

  Please refer to the TODO file to read about some immediate future projects  
  about development of this tool.


REQUIREMENTS:
  libpcap >= 0.6.x  -- http://www.tcpdump.org/


PLATFORMS:
  It has been tested and worked fine for:

  Red Hat Linux 7.x/8.x/9.x (*)
  Fedora Core 1/2
  Slackware Linux 8.x/9.x
  SuSE Linux 9.x
  OpenBSD 3.2/3.3 i386
  FreeBSD 4.x/5.x i386
  Tru64 5.x

  (*) In RH 7.x pcap.h header in /usr/include/pcap/ calls a bpf.h
  header supposed to be in /usr/include/net/bpf.h; doing some checks,
  i found the header in /usr/include/pcap/net/bpf.h; this bug makes 
  to fail pcap header consistency checks in configure script. Please
  verify and eventually take care to make a symlink from /usr/include/pcap/net/bpf.h
  to /usr/include/net/bpf.h 

  Did you successfully completed compilation and installation of the
  software on some other operating system or architecture not listed
  here ? Please, let me know. 


NETFLOW:
  Supported versions: V1/V5

  Netflow packets have been read successfully from:
  Cisco 2500, Cisco 7500; IOS 12.1
  Juniper M10; JunOS 6.2

  Did you successfully read Netflow packets from other network equipments
  not listed here ? Please, let me know.


INSTALLATION:
  see INSTALL and EXAMPLES files


LICENSE:
  GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
  see COPYING for details.


CONTACTS:
  see AUTHORS file.  


Cheers,
Paolo
