flow-tools mit Homebrew, dnf, MacPorts installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream-Dokumentation
• Paketmanager-Seite

Befehle und Aliase

• flow-capture
• flow-cat
• flow-dscan
• flow-expire
• flow-export
• flow-fanout
• flow-filter
• flow-gen
• flow-header
• flow-import
• flow-log2rrd
• flow-mask
• flow-merge
• flow-nfilter
• flow-print
• flow-receive
• flow-report
• flow-rpt2rrd
• flow-rptfmt
• flow-send
• flow-split
• flow-stat
• flow-tag
• flow-xlate

Projektgeschichte

The archived upstream README says flow-tools was originally written by Mark Fullmer while he was working at Ohio State University, with documentation, functionality, and feedback from Steve Romig and the OSU network security group. It also credits OARnet and the Ohio ITEC with funding work on version 8 PDU support and other features.

The project's older changelog shows an established pre-Git release history through the early 2000s, including 0.65, 0.66, 0.67, and 0.68 releases. The source now lives in the Google Code archive, preserving the code, SGML man pages, examples, and historical changelog.

Adoptionsgeschichte

flow-tools circulated as a Unix network-operations package for sites collecting Cisco and Juniper NetFlow exports. The changelog records fixes and requested features from universities, network operators, and backbone users, reflecting use in operational traffic accounting and troubleshooting environments.

Wie es verwendet wird

The toolset is composed of small Unix-style commands such as flow-capture, flow-cat, flow-report, flow-filter, flow-print, flow-send, and flow-gen. Official man-page sources describe deployments on one server or split across multiple servers for larger flow-collection setups.

Common use cases include collecting router exports, concatenating short capture windows into longer report windows, filtering records, generating top-talkers and AS reports, tagging customer networks, exporting to other formats, and replaying or generating NetFlow data for tests.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

For package maintainers, flow-tools is a classic example of a mature C networking utility suite: many small binaries, generated man pages, sample configuration files, and long-lived ABI/protocol assumptions around NetFlow versions. It remains relevant in package indexes because NetFlow workflows often depend on stable old command names.

Zeitleiste

• 2003: flow-tools 0.65, 0.66, and 0.67 appear in the historical changelog.
• 2005: flow-tools 0.68 is released with report post-processing helpers and many portability and NetFlow handling fixes.
• 2016: Google Code archive preserves the upstream source repository snapshot.

Related projects

• The official documentation frames flow-tools around NetFlow exports from Cisco and Juniper routers and includes import/export support for cflowd-style data.

Quellen

• https://code.google.com/archive/p/flow-tools
• https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-source/v2/code.google.com/flow-tools/source-archive.zip