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| Monitoring Networks With Sound |
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posted by Editor on Monday September 17, @11:42PM
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Peep is a network monitoring tool that represents network information via an audio interface, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event. Using Peep, one can detect common network problems such as high load, excessive traffic, and email spam, by comparing sounds being played with those of a normally functioning network. This allows system administrators to concentrate on more important things while monitoring the network via peripheral hearing. In practice, it actually sounds like rainforest creatures rummaging about in the background. Here is a USENIX paper that describes its function. On the same topic, here is a humorous account from the Jargon file in which someone hacked together an audio interface to ping(8) for isolating a faulty cable segment on a LAN.
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- This sort of thing is a topic I have discussed with many people over and over again, including a friend who has used the same Windows sound scheme for almost ten years. The noise drives me nuts, but he has a hard time computing without it.-
I would like to try this out with music. Imagine inputting the sheet music to be played with midi instruments, playing fine when the network is running normally, but speeding up, slowing down, and having certain instruments go sharp or flat as the network begins to vary.
Of course, on most networks the music would never be pleasant, so I guess it would really sort of suck.
I wonder how this could be combined with intrusion detection tools? Imagine hearing the screams of animals being attacked for individual events, or a horrendous storm and cracking trees as a DOS hits.
Damn this could be fun in SOOOO many ways.
My /. karma never ends, time to start over elsewhere.
My real email address ends in .org, and does not contain the phr
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...so sound can often be useful. I find myself particularly using the lower-tech approach of noticing/ignoring sounds generated by my email-checking client, which also pops up a one-line From/Subject header in the bottom right corner of my screen for 5-10 seconds. Pretty useful.
Sound seems to have been largely ignored or minimized in UI design. I'm not sure whether its primarily because of concerns of disrupting people in the next office, or it's a reflection of something I noticed after a few years in the graphics industry-- people new to graphics and graphics interfaces often don't recognize how much sound really can add to the experience and impact of the graphics. SGI's best SIGGRAPH demos in the old days had great accompanying soundtracks. If you want something compelling, good sound is essential.
--Greg
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Ask an aside, where I sometimes work we've just finished a huge database driven (coldfusion) web site. For some reason the coldFusion server kept restarting itself and we were trying to track down why. I quickly knocked up a stat reporting tool (average request times, etc), which displayed a whole bunch of numbers, and so on.
No-one had the time, or eyes to watch them, so I very quickly added the sound of a heart beat to the webpage, with the pitch going up as the request time got longer. An alarm goes off when the server restarts.
Now we can listen to how the server is coping, so far it's gone down once (the sound of the heart not beating is deafening), but the expect "high" heart rate never took place. Result we heard the the server wasn't restarting due to high load.
Only draw back is the deep beating heart makes you feel like you're in the womb and sends you to sleep!
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