SMB Traffic Analyzer v2 and the new clients

The SMB traffic analyzer software suite is a toolset aimed at visualizing the data flow on one or more Samba servers, providing statistics about the usage of Samba services. The long term goal of the SMB Traffic Analyzer project is to provide a universal remote debugging facility for Samba.

When I introduced SMB Traffic Analyzer Version 2, and released a backported version from the Samba master repository of the protocol for Samba 3.5.2, I was not going into detail about the future of the client programs, because the development was at a stage of only theoretical planning. Now we have made a few more steps at planning and developing, so I can tell more about the plans for SMBTAv2.

First off, we have stopped the development of a graphical client. That means the development of the programm called “stadview” is basically stopped. Instead, we have decided to have two text mode clients that will really rock.

There is smbtad, the successor of the stad-daemon, and besides the new smb_traffic_analyzer VFS module in Samba, it is clearly the  major part of SMBTA v2. It is implementing all the features of the VFS module, allows different versions of the protocol,  runs with 128bit AES encryption, and is processing all VFS functions defined by the protocol.  We plan to release a first version of smbtad together with smbtaquery – read on!

There is smbtaquery which is using a simplified language for the user to query the database.  With it, users will be able to produce complete reports about the data flow on Samba servers with just a single command line.  Currently in development and already able to run a lot of interesting queries, we hope to publish a first release very soon!

Then there’s smbtamonitor that is an idea at the moment, nothing is implemented so far. Smbtamonitor will allow the user to view the state of the Samba network in real time. To be able to provide realistic real time results, it will use special features of smbtad making it independent of long lasting SQL queries.

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