Connection Control in Linux

[puddpunk]

Hey Guys,

At home, I'm thinking of replacing my SUSE based server/firewall with Gentoo and some wicked security stuff (i.e. GRSec and maybe selinux if I can get around to it). I've decided to use Gentoo for this because I have a lot of experience in keeping it running.

Anyway, this is to a be a "server of all trades" and run a mail server (Qmail with VPopmail, courier-imap and f-prot.), a web server (apache) for internal (LAN) and external (web) access and WWW and FTP caching (squid). It will be a file/print sharing box for the internal network (via samba, cups and NFS), monitor incoming traffic to a MySQL database (snort) and be displayed on the web (acid). It will also provide DHCP addresses to the internal network.

Now most of these goodies can be controlled through a decent web interface (webmin, acid, swat, qmail-admin etc...) but the one thing i miss from when we had a Windows 2000 server with winproxy on it is the ability to easily view connections, and deal with those connections how you will.

For instance, there would be a tree display like this:

192.168.0.1
| - <LAN source> <destination> <port> <duration>
| - 192.168.0.2 www.google.com 80 20

And on that connection I could click and have options like: Terminate etc....

Now I'm not looking for anything as fancy as that, but what would be nice is if I could load a webpage with... probably a java applet that can keep up with the connections and states would be nice, but even a PHP script or something that keeps updating and allows me to terminate, or throttle a connection.

I could easily terminate or throttle a connection from the command line using tcpkill or tcpnice from the dsniff tool set, but aside from being incredibly out of date, I don't exactly trust those programs on my internet-accessable server!

So has anybody come across something even remotely like this? Even something that I can hack on and perhaps add features to. I've had a quick look at things like ntop but it didnt really fit my needs.

Any advice welcome,
Cheers,
Chris.
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THIS SIG INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

[revertex]

I'm sure you will be surprised with ntop.
Awesome app., i don't know why there so little popularity.

http://www.ntop.org/ntop.html

Cheers

[mallchin]

Does ntop allow one to throttle a network connection?
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[revertex]

[mallchin]