Welcome to softflowd, a flow-based network monitor.
softflowd listens promiscuously on a network interface and semi-statefully tracks network flows. These flows can be reported using NetFlow version 1, 5 or 9 datagrams. softflowd is fully IPv6 capable: it can track IPv6 flows and export to IPv6 hosts.
More details about softflowd's function and usage may be found in the supplied manpages, which you can view prior to installation using
/usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc softflowd.8 | less /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc softflowctl.8 | less
If you are in need of a NetFlow collector, you may be interested in softflowd's companion project "flowd" (http://www.mindrot.org/flowd.html). flowd is a NetFlow collector that is maintained in parallel with softflowd and includes a few handy features, such as the ability to filter flows it receives as well as Perl and Python APIs to its storage format. NB. You don't have to use flowd: any NetFlow compatible collector should work with softflowd. An example Perl collector is included for testing purposes as collector.pl, but it doesn't yet support NetFlow v.9
Building softflowd should be as simple as typing:
./configure make make install
Unfortunately some systems like to make life complicated. Things work fine on the systems that I develop and test on (OpenBSD and Linux). There is peliminary support for Solaris 9 (i.e. it compiled), but no testing on this platform has been performed.
Softflowd is licensed under a two-term BSD license (see the source files for details). The code in sys-tree.h is Copyright Niels Provos provos@citi.umich.edu and comes straight from OpenBSD CVS, convtime.c comes is Copyright Kevin Steves and comes from OpenSSH (misc.c). Both of these files are licensed under two-term BSD licenses too. strlcpy.c, strlcat.c and closefrom.c also come from OpenBSD CVS and are Copyright Todd C. Miller. Please refer to the LICENSE file for full details.
Please report bugs in softflowd to http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/ If you find a security bug, please report it directly by email. If you have any feedback or questions, please email me:
Softflowd has an extensive TODO list of interesting features, large and small, that are waiting to be implemented. If you are interested in helping, please contact me.
The latest source code may be obtained from Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/softflowd/
Damien Miller djm@mindrot.org