Check out Hackweek 9, and explore all the cool ideas people have put on the table to hack on for a week!

The whole real-time infrastructure has been redesigned and rebuilt. We have concentrated on making the interface simpler, and splitted the infrastructure into a very simple and lightweight generic client called “smbtamonitor-gen“, that can be called by a parent process (such as a graphical client), connect to smbtad and interface with the parent by unix domain sockets on the local machine. This allows us to develop more complex real time applications that don’t need to cope with the low level networking to smbtad. For a start, we have developed two basic real-time apps, a text mode client for the command line interface, called  “smbtamonitor-cli” that does nothing else than posting traffic values on the command line and can be used as a foundation for more complex clients,

An instance of smbtamonitor-qt running against a traffic simulation. Of course it runs flawless against real servers too.

and Nanuk Krinner developed a first version of “smbtamonitor-qt“, a real-time application employing the QT library to allow a new level of usability and features on the desktop level. Although being seen as a starter, smbtamonitor-qt is already able to dynamically zoom in and out of Samba traffic in real-time, from a time range of a day, to a scale of up to 5 seconds ( bso#8932, bso#8919). Also we have fixed a crash in the smbtamonitor-gen component when a Samba object could not be identified (bso#8280).

Since SMBTA is not only about real-time, the project relies on a database to store Samba traffic that happened in the past. Here we track more detailed data, such as usernames, filenames, and ip addresses to name a few. The groundwork tool to allow for stable, complex and portable querying of this data is smbtaquery, which produces XML that allows other tools sitting on top of smbtaquery to interpret and create views out of the data. smbtaquery has relativly complex time functions that allow to limit queries over specific timeframes. The qouting mechanism in smbtaquery has been enhanced to allow more complex timestamps given as time delimiters in functions (bso#8169), and a segmentation fault when no database driver was given either in configuration or by command line, has been fixed (bso#9061).

We have fixed a segmentation fault in smbtaquery (bso#9061), and fixed a crash of smbtad when handling multiple real-time clients (bso#8934).

The new function ‘system->self-check’ shows the status of all components of the software chain, and can be run by admistrator-type users from within webSMBTA.

When updating from a former version of SMBTA, it was usually necessary to call “smbtad -C” to convert the existing database to the newer version where we have added features. Due to changes in the database scheme, that now includes integrated version control, smbtad just needs to be restarted, and it will check the database version against the format that it is running on, and convert the database fully automatically when needed. There are also new functions to smbtaquery to allow the user to check that any component is up to date. (bso#8206). smbtad will now also dynamically update the protocol version of VFS modulesthat are connecting to it. Therefore, within a “report” function, smbtaquery is able to tell the user

Time range selection has been eased by using this widget within webSMBTA.

about the status of the whole software chain, and adds comments and notes to where it applies. For example, the VFS module, as coming from a specific Samba version, might already implement a few new features that are not yet used in SMBTA by smbtad and the rest of the tools. These features might be added later to the rest of the software suite, and smbtad simply ignores these features to stay compatible. The report function in smbtaquery is able to inform the user about this status. Last but not least, SMBTA 1.2.6 can also self check online for a new version of the software package, so that the user will be informed about the availability of a new version of SMBTA on it’s website.

Administrators will have a new function that allows to retrieve the configuration settings of a remote running smbtad instance. There are two versions of it, one returns a fully commented list of configuration settings, another is in a simpler format just listing all the configuration values. This function is of help in bug reports. It can be called from within webSMBTA.

Upon user requests, we adapted smbtad to also run on sqlite3, again. This time via libDBI, and all our initial tests worked fine as far as smbtad is involved. Tests using smbtatools are still pending and any user who wants to join testing smbtatools for sqlite3 is highly welcome (bso#8288).

The webSMBTA component now integrates user management and authentification, allowing for

The administrative interface in webSMBTA allows to add/set/remove admin users and normal users.

users that have administrator-rights and normal users. Functions such as the remote configuration report of smbtad are only able to be used by administrator-class users. webSMBTA allows full user management within the web interface. More than one admistrator-class user can be added, and also as much users as wanted. (bso#8167).

In addition to this, webSMBTA stores the functions that a user has been running, and is able to restore the “workplace” of every user when logging in (bso#8496). Every function callable in webSMBTA now has a way to produce alternative output. That means, not only HTML, the user can also request the output in ASCII (or any other format we might support in future), and webSMBTA will offer the alternative format as a download. Related to this new feature, it also offers a print-view on every function it is running. (bso#8172). The webSMBTA functionality to select time modifiers has been enhanced and allows comfortably to select time ranges by using a calendar widget.

webSMBTA now has a small input field that triggers a search function as you type…

One of the really cool additions to webSMBTA is an integrated “global search”.

… the search function will immediately be displayed and updated as you type, runs over anything SMBTA has seen, identifies what objects it has found, and makes those clickable….

The user can just enter free form text and webSMBTA will search through the whole database while typing, and identify each objects it is going to find. Clicking on one of the found objects will automatically set the object chooser of webSMBTA to point at this object. This function greatly eases usability and offers a fascinating

… and a click on an object triggers webSMBTA to mark the chosen object in it’s selector for the user to further examine the object!

way to search through a Samba network (bso#8237, bso#8298). To easy the way webSMBTA is handling the database, a “–test-db” option has been added to smbtaquery, allowing to only test the database connection, and do nothing else. This allows for better error handling within webSMBTA (bso#8270). For it’s internal operations, webSMTA is requesting some space to temporary store some helper files. The path on the filesystem to use these helper files has been hardcoded to /tmp in former versions, now a variable temporary storage path can be given by setting the Dir.tmpdir variable inside of webSMBTA (bso#8497), wich is of help on systems where the usual /tmp path is not reachable or an other temporary storage path has to be used. On a side note, webSMBTA has been ported and tested on rails 3.2 during the Hackweek event at SUSE in 2012.

Our project documentationis no longer available within the package.

The whole documentation set for SMBTA has been moved to SambaWiki.

Instead, Benjamin Brunner converted the whole documentation from asciiDOC to wiki format and moved it to SambWiki in an effort around the Hackweek8 event at SUSE. This will allow developers to quickly change the documentation in future, a motivational plus when it comes to maintain the documentation in relation to bugs and features Many thanks to Benjamin for this large effort, it marks a starting point for us to move SMBTA to a new homepage, which is in our plans.

We have once again changed the database format, this time for good hopefully. We have simplified the database format a lot to help making new features much more trivial and easier to implement. Additionally, we store more dynamic data in the database while smbtad is running, such as the number of connected modules, and from where (from which IP) they come from (bso#8205). A critical bug in smbtad has been fixed, that now assumes that any filename or path entries in the database have to be qouted. In former versions, filenames such as ‘   “hello world”  ‘ could have caused problems when querying the database (bso#8232). smbtad now allows to bind to an interface address and works as well as within IPv4 and IPv6 networks (bso#8321).

Benchmarking and performance

Performance tests with a file size of 1MB

tests have been run to show the speed penalty one gets from using SMBTA. By using the Phoronix testsuite, Robert Piasek has run a few tests employing exactly what smbtad was optimized for, and we have added the results to the package. Performance loss is one the most asked questions when we are doing presentations around SMBTA everywhere (bso#8210).

SMB Traffic Analyzer is free software, released under GPLv3. For more information, please visit it’s homepage.

Still, there are a few places here and there where the documentation needs to be fine tuned, but the main work is done, and we are more than happy with the result! This enables individual developers of the team to easily add and change the documentation when it is required. Thank you Benjamin!

Joshua Tree National Park. Full of wonders.

"Mutter und Kind" @ San Diego Zoo

Well last weeks have been pretty busy. With a 10 hours flight, we arrived at San Francisco to get to San Diego to visit the Teradata Partners conference, an excellent event that included good discussions and lots of acceptance and recognition for SUSE Linux. I liked the way talks have been organized, or to say it in other words it was a matter of downloading an Android app to always have the overview. We served the SUSE booth at the conference, got involved into lots of discussions about the OS, and I was even happier in the moments when people asked questions on openSUSE – this is showing clearly that the project is well known! To leave some words on San Diego is very simple: Gaslamp Quarter, I’ll be back, and have a few more beers at Rock Bottom!

We then drove from San Diego to Salt Lake City by car. Having some days of vacation in between, this was the best choice. During our travel we stopped by and visited San Diego Zoo, the Joshua Tree national park, Zion national park, and Bryce Canyon.

In Salt Lake, Novell’s Brainshare conference was about to start. And guess what I’ve had the chance to present SMB Traffic Analyzer at this amazing conference! I’ve had the presentation two times actually, presenting the very latest development snapshot of SMBTA and while it was not visited by so many people, the ones who listened have been very tough and showed great interest, giving me the chance to make new contacts, and lots of discussion about Samba and SMB Traffic Analyzer, and openSUSE. So to bring this to an end: Brainshare was exciting!

SMB Traffic Analyzer is developing healthy. I was presenting Benjamin Brunner’s work on the real-time search function, user management, and the very latest statistic functions in webSMBTA. We haven’t had a release in the last months, which is unusual for SMBTA. That is actually caused by features we want to implement for the release. These features, such as SVG graphics for usage diagrams are not yet done,and I am working on it.

You guess it, we finally got a slot for a presentation at the wonderful openSUSE conference for SMBTA. To me, it is remarkable to see a project like SMBTA being presented at OSC because it is not really something related to openSUSE. It’s not that SMBTA improves your boot time, or discusses details of the buildservice, or makes your life with the openSUSE distribution better in any way. SMBTA is very likely not even interesting to the casual user, except for some administrators.

That said, SMBTA was born inside of the openSUSE infrastructure, growing to a project used on different distributions and operating systems, such as Solaris. And the one thing we can really say is that we exploited all the services that make up openSUSE to the core. We used the openSUSE Buildservice from the beginning, and we use appliances created by SUSE Studio for both demoing and developing SMBTA.

With the recent release of Samba 3.6.0, among it’s top changes like full SMB2 support and other major features, it is also prime time for SMBTA. The Virtual File System layer module that supports our current infrastructure is included in this release of the Samba CIFS server and that marks a milestone for our project. SMBTA is already used in production at some sites, and the release of Samba 3.6.0 will hopefully forward this trend.

Benjamin Brunner and me will give an introduction talk to SMB Traffic Analyzer at the openSUSE conference and most likely live-demo the software chain. We’ll welcome anyone interested to join our presentation at OSC!

Such as Benjamin Brunner of the development team has taken the search function to a new level by creating a simple way to fuzzy search your full Samba network:

webSMBTA now has a small input field that triggers a search function as you type...

... the search function will immediately be displayed and updated as you type, runs over anything SMBTA has seen, identifies what objects it has found, and makes those clickable....

... and a click on an object triggers webSMBTA to mark the chosen object in it's selector for the user to further examine the object!

Other stuff we are working on for SMBTA 1.2.6 are about making it easier for the administrator to inspect and check the SMBTA setup. Among these, SMBTA 1.2.6 will be able to tell which VFS modules have connected, which protocol version was used by them, and where they did come from. Should it be required, for example for bugreports, the smbtad configuration can be retrieved in an easy way through smbtatools. SMBTA 1.2.6 components will self check for version updates and can tell the administrator what needs to be done in case of configuration errors.

A browser showing webSMBTA, connected to a SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4 virtual machine.

Ever wanted to just try SMB Traffic Analyzer to see what it can do for you, but have been hindered by the hassle of setup and configuration? Today the SMBTA team released SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4, a complete self containing appliance to be run by your virtualization software, such as vmware or VirtualBox.

It has never been easier to give SMBTA a try.

An instance of the smbtamonitor real time program running against SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4 in VirtualBox.

Just download the OVF image we provide via SUSE Gallery, setup your virtual machine to have network access, and point your web browser to the hostname or IP adress of your virtual machine. Also, you can run all real time clients such as the smbtamonitor program, or our interface to rrdtool, rrddriver, against SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4. It has an open port for real time clients on port number 3491.

At the very first connect to webSMBTA, a configuration dialog will appear, asking the user to which database the connection has to be made. To run with SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4, just fill out the form exactly like given in the screenshot.

At the very first connection to webSMBTA, use these parameters to connect to the database in SMBTA Stresstest.

SMBTA Stresstest 0.0.4 comes with a preinstalled Samba server, is configured to host three shares on that server, and generates constant data traffic by six users that are running smbtatorture instances, a program we developed to test SMBTA. Thanks to the hard work of Benjamin Brunner on this release, the webSMBTA component is running out of the box in this release, hosted by an Apache webserver.

This release is based on our latest and greatest stable release of SMB Traffic Analyzer, version 1.2.5, and the rest of the software stack based on openSUSE 11.4. Needless to say: This release of SMBTA Stresstest was created with the fabulous SUSE Studio!

You can download the SMBTA Stresstest appliance from SUSE Studio, more information on the SMB Traffic Analyzer project is available here.

The team is proud to release SMB Traffic Analyzer version 1.2.5. Among numerous changes and enhancements, this release brings a huge documentation update on webSMBTA, thanks to Benjamin of the SMBTA team. In smbtaquery, we had a bug that caused the “from..to” and “since” time modifiers on functions not to work (bso#8169). Furthermore, this release fixes an error condition on smbtad which we encountered during the SambaXP conference, when a directory was created that already existed. Packages for Gentoo Linux and openSUSE should be available very soon, and with release 1.2.5, we’ve sub-packaged webSMBTA. The “one click install” option  for openSUSE will install all required repositories such as rails3 to run webSMBTA from the apache webserver. We have added installation instructions to the source tarball.

SMB Traffic Analyzer 1.2.5 makes changes to the database being used by SMBTA. We provide an upgrade path from whichever version of SMBTA you are coming from. Just run “smbtaquery -C” and follow the instructions.

Checkout the SMB Traffic Analyzer homepage to get more information and download options.