Overview

RIZAP (Realtime Internet ZAP) is a graphic program that shows realtime traffic on a network. Each packet is shown as a "zap", a line between nodes located in the local and remote networks. It is useful for telling network health at a glance (esp. WAN).

It is especially useful on WAN links such as an Internet pipe. Since it is very animated and colorful anyone watching can learn to spot patterns in network traffic. It is also very interesting to run on a home machine as you can watch who your machine talks to on the Internet. It runs nice on a 5000 node network.

Rizap consists of two parts, the client and the server. The server "sniffs" the network promiscisly and sends source,destination, and port to any connected clients. Clients connect by sending a datagram to the server containing the password. The client does this periodically to remain connected, otherwise the server will time out the connection. Rizap uses UDP to avoid troubles with backed up pipes and TCP error correction. If your client is overloaded (it can't draw everything with 1/20 second) a red skull will appear. The client is also capable of sniffing the local network interface via libpcap.

To download or view screenshots please go to the Source Forge project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rizap3d.

If you have problems or questions please discuss in the Open Forum on the project page.

Hardware Requirements

• Definitely a 3D card with GLX extentions. It has been tested mostly on Nvidia cards.

• Any relativily new CPU will be ok. The heavy work is in the GPU. Any 2Ghz should be ok.

• It uses about 100MB of memory. 512MB or above should be good.

It runs real nice on:

• Intel 2.8 Ghz 4GB 7300 Nvidia

• AMD FX-55 2 GB 7800 Nvidia SLI

• Centrino Duo 2GB Intel 945 video chipset

Software Requirements

• Linux. Rizap has been tested on Gentoo.

• SDL (with OpenGL support)

• OpenGL with GLU library.

• SDL-image

• libpcap

Rizap Client

If you simply want to see what Rizap does:

1. tar -xzf rizap-0.03.tar.gz

2. cd rizap3d-0.03

3. ./configure

4. make

5. rizap demo (This will run rizap with random data, just to see if it works)

6. rizap local (you'll need to run rizap as root, other wise it cannot find the network interface)

7. Go surfing, downloading, chatting whatever! Watch Rizap to see your network in action!!!

Note: Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Rizap with Server

1. Get a linux server with a connection to the network you want to monitor.

2. Create a rizap configuration file. Create a /etc/rizap/config file that contains (for example):

interface=eth0

password=secret

3. The client step above builds the server as well. However, if your Rizap server doesn't have all the things like OpenGL, there's a rizapd.make so you can

"make -f rizapd.make"

4. Start the rizapd program. If something is wrong with the configuration file from step 2 it will tell you.

5. On a machine where you wish to run the client, first perform steps outlined in "RIZAP Client."

6. Create a config file in your users home directory such as "/home/user/.rizap/config" containing (for example):

interface=eth0

local=10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0

password=secret

host=10.10.10.3

7. Configure the host above to be your rizap server address.

8. If everything is right, start rizap without any options and it will use the config file.