Monitoring Network Access

We've got to install the two packages that the team will use to generate and monitor traffic. Let's use YUM to get it done:

[root@server1]# yum install iptraf-ng nc

Repeat this on the other server:

[root@server2]# yum install iptraf-ng nc

On the first server, let's run iptraf-ng and go under Configure... In the menu, don't forget this isn't a menu we control with a mouse -- it's all keyboard. Make sure Logging is toggled to On. Set the log file path to: home/cloud_user/traffic_log.txt. Then go into IP traffic monitor. In the next menu, select eth0. Once we press Enter the logging will start.

Listen for Traffic

Let's open a second terminal into server1 and run sudo su right off. Once we're there, we're going to start netcat listening on post 2525 with this:

[root@server1]# nc -l 2525

Send Some Traffic

Now, let's start talking. Back in the server2 window we've got open, send netcat traffic to server1 with this (where x.x.x.x is the internal IP of server1 that we'll see on the hands-on lab overview page):

[root@server2]# nc x.x.x.x 2525

We'll just land at a blinking cursor below the prompt, but we can type a message there and press Enter. Once we do, it will show up back in the window we're listening in on server1. A bunch of messages sent from server2 would look like this:

[root@server2]# nc x.x.x.x 2525
test
test
testing
This is a test

On server1, they would look like this when they arrive:

[root@server1]# nc -l 2525
test
test
testing
This is a test

That should be enough traffic for what we're doing. On server2, press Ctrl + C to kill the nc command we've got running and flip back over to the terminal we were running iptraf-ng in. Press x to stop the monitoring and get out, then choose Exit from the main menu.

Examine the Log

On server1, if we run ls /home/cloud_user we should see traffic_log.txt listed in the output. Read that to see if it was capturing what we need:

[root@server1]# less /home/cloud_user/traffic_log.txt

We should see some log entries showing traffic going from server2 to server1 on port 2525.