NAME:
  pmacct (Promiscuous mode IP Accounting package) v0.6.3
  pmacct is Copyright (C) 2004 by Paolo Lucente


DESCRIPTION:
  pmacct is a network tool to gather ip traffic informations (bytes
  counter and number of packets); aggregation of statistics is done
  using simple primitives (MAC addresses, source host, destination
  host, ports and ip protocols) that can be used alone or combined
  together to form complex aggregation methods; counters are either
  global or historical (aggregated and separated at fixed timeslots).
  Data is stored in a in-memory table or using a sql database (MySQL or
  PostgreSQL). Gathering packets off the wire is done using pcap library
  and promiscuous mode of network interfaces when specifically required.

  Well, posed that ip accounting could be useful for billing purposes,
  bandwidth management, traffic analysis and posed that there are many
  valid software that pose in their objectives those accounting tasks
  such as Darren Reed's IPFilter or Linux NetFilter code, why someone
  starts to develop something similar from the scratch ?   
  My personal answer is that today in many network environments who cares
  about the network management cannot put his hands on a router (property
  of a telephone company or isp) to display/clear accounting statistics,
  and mostly no-one wants to put any kind of pc or workstation, forwarding
  back and forth packets in critical paths of the networ both for technical
  and security reasons. On the contrary, today, many ethernet switches
  support redirecting all traffic to some kind of "sniff" port.
  
  Please refer to the TODO file to read about some immediate future projects  
  about development of this tool.


REQUIREMENTS:
  libpcap >= 0.6.x  -- http://www.tcpdump.org/


PLATFORMS:
  It has been tested and worked fine for:

  Red Hat Linux 7.x/8.x/9.x (*)
  Slackware Linux 8.x/9.x
  OpenBSD 3.2/3.3 i386
  FreeBSD 4.x/5.x i386
  Tru64 5.x

  (*) In RH 7.x pcap.h header in /usr/include/pcap/ calls a bpf.h
  header supposed to be in /usr/include/net/bpf.h; doing some checks,
  i found the header in /usr/include/pcap/net/bpf.h; this bug makes 
  to fail pcap header consistency checks in configure script. Please
  verify and eventually take care to make a symlink from /usr/include/pcap/net/bpf.h
  to /usr/include/net/bpf.h 

  Did you successfully completed compilation and installation of the
  software on some other operating system or architecture not listed
  here ? Please, let me know. 


INSTALLATION:
  see INSTALL and EXAMPLES files


LICENSE:
  GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
  see COPYING for details.


CONTACTS:
  see AUTHORS file.  


Cheers,
Paolo
