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cflowd configuration: cfdcollect configuration Next Previous Contents

6. cfdcollect configuration

cfdcollect uses a simple configuration file, typically named cfdcollect.conf and located in the /usr/local/arts/etc/ directory. cfdcollect.conf should contain two types of stanzas: a single 'system' stanza specifying system-wide values for cfdcollect, and one or more 'cflowd' stanzas (one for each instance of cflowd).

6.1 system stanza

The system stanza is used to set system-wide values for cfdcollect. There should be only one of these in cfdcollect.conf, and it should be the first stanza. Following are descriptions of each of the variables in the system stanza.

logFacility

Sets the syslog facility to be used for logging by cfdcollect.

dataDirectory

Sets the top-level directory in which to store ARTS data for each router. cfdcollect actually writes into subdirectories under dataDirectory for each router, with the subdirectories named by the IP address of each router (corresponding to the HOST setting for routers in cflowd.conf). For example, if you set dataDirectory to /usr/local/arts/cflowd/data, the data for router 204.212.46.1 would wind up in the /usr/local/arts/cflowd/data/204.212.46.1 directory.

filePrefix

Sets the file prefix to be used when writing ARTS data to files. cfdcollect uses filenames of the form filePrefix.YYYYMMDD to store ARTS data. Ther normal filePrefix setting is 'arts'. Continuing with the example from the last section, data for router 204.212.46.1 for September 23, 1998 would wind up in /usr/local/arts/cflowd/data/204.212.46.1/arts.19980923

pidFile

Specifies the full path to the file in which cfdcollect should store its process ID.

Example

An example system stanza is shown below. It tells cfdcollect to syslog with the local6 facility, place data in the /usr/local/arts/data/cflowd directory, use 'arts' as the file prefix when creating data files, and to store its process ID in /usr/local/arts/etc/cfdcollect.pid.

system {
  logFacility:          local6          #  Syslog to local6 facility.
  dataDirectory:        /usr/local/arts/data/cflowd
  filePrefix:           arts
  pidFile:              /usr/local/arts/etc/cfdcollect.pid
}

6.2 cflowd stanza

The cflowd stanza is used to set configuration variables for an instance of cflowd from which we want cfdcollect to retrieve data. Following are the descriptions of each of the variables in the cflowd stanza.

host

The host running cflowd. This may be a hostname or an IP address.

tcpCollectPort

Sets the port to which to connect to on the host running cflowd. This is the TCP port on which cflowd is listening, corresponding to the TCPCOLLECTPORT setting in the OPTIONS stanza of cflowd.conf.

minPollInterval

Sets the minimum interval between connections to cflowd. This is not an exact interval timer, since cfdcollect processes all cflowd instances with a single thread (serially).

Example

Following is an example cflowd stanza. It tells cfdcollect to contact cflowd on foo.mydomain.net port 2056 every 300 seconds (5 minutes) to retrieve the tabular data from cflowd.

cflowd {
  host:                 foo.mydomain.net
  tcpCollectPort:       2056
  minPollInterval:      300
}


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Related Objects

See https://catalog.caida.org/software/cflowd/ to explore related objects to this document in the CAIDA Resource Catalog.