Pre-order Now!
Network Flow Analysis

by Michael W. Lucas
from No Starch Press
June 2010

Blaming the network is easy. It's traditional. And it's (usually) wrong.

Cover Illustration

Servers have log files, performance monitors, and other tools to assess and record system and application behavior. Traditional network devices have one LED on each port, and if you're lucky the LED blinks when anything happens. Maybe you have something to tell you how busy an interface is, but generally a network device is a black box. Network Flow Analysis opens the black box, demonstrating how to use the freely-available flow-tools software and the capabilities of your existing hardware to assess, analyze, and debug your network.

Author Web Site Discount: Pre-Order now! Use coupon code ILUVMICHAEL for a 25% discount!
(Books will be shipped from No Starch Press after printing)

Get a preview! Read Chapter 4.

A network administrator's abilities are as good as his awareness of what happens on his network. Flow analysis is the industry-standard method of collecting and recording network traffic. Flow analysis lets you see what types of traffic passed between hosts, without having to reproduce the problem.

Flow export and analysis transforms network administration from a stomach-churning mix of guesswork, issue reproduction, and head-scratching to a fact-based science that lets you focus on resolving problems at their source.

Network administrators: When a problem is yours, own it. When a problem isn't yours, prove it.

  • Stop asking your users to reproduce problems
  • Leverage the capabilities of your existing hardware
  • Identify network, server, router, and firewall problems before they become critical
  • Find defective and misconfigured software
  • Has anyone accessed that old server in the last day, month, or year? Find out.
  • Quickly find virus-spewing machines -- even on a global network, even when the culprit is on a different continent
  • Is it a network problem, or is it a server problem that looks like a network problem?
  • Automatically produce graphs suited for your environment, and provide friendly Web-based interfaces to your customers

    Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Get the evidence. Read Network Flow Analysis today.

    Buy the Book Now! You can get Network Flow Analysis at a special Official Book Web Site Discount of 25%, with coupon code ILUVMICHAEL. Not only does this cost you a little less, but a wee bit more of your money goes to support the author's bad habits. (Online orders are handled by No Starch Press, and will be shipped as soon as the book returns from the printer.)

    About the author:

    MICHAEL LUCAS is the author of countless articles and several popular computer books: Absolute BSD, Absolute OpenBSD, Absolute FreeBSD,Cisco Routers for the Desperate, PGP and GPG. He's been a pet wrangler, a librarian, a security consultant, and now works as a network administrator/sysadmin/generally responsible party. You can see his personal web page for more information.