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Four winning ways to monitor machines through Web interfaces
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niff(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual niff(7) NAME
niff - Network Interface Failure Finder (NIFF) introductory information. DESCRIPTION
The Network Interface Failure Finder, NIFF, is a facility for detecting and reporting possible failures in network interface cards (NICs) or their connections. Detection is done by monitoring device counters and attempting to generate traffic to NICs suspected of having failed. Reporting is done using the Event Manager subsystem (EVM). NIFF does not drive failover operations; that is the responsibility of the application that subscribes to NIFF's EVM events. Appropriate courses of action may include selecting another network interface for communication or if it is a clustered environment, migrating an application. See nr(7) for further information. At the heart of NIFF is the traffic monitor thread. The traffic monitor thread tracks changes in the network device's counters, and notes if the received packet counter remains unchanged since the previous snapshot. As long as the counter continues to increase, the traffic monitor thread assumes the NIC is functioning. See nifftmt(7) for further information. The traffic monitor thread can monitor any network interface. The configuration utility, niffconfig, is used to activate and administer the traffic monitor thread. See nifftmt(7) and niffconfig(8) for further information. The Network Interface Failure Finder daemon, niffd, is a traffic generator for network interfaces that have been classified inactive by the kernel traffic monitor thread. The purpose of niffd is to get the interface packet counters to increment, signifying the interface is still alive and well. See niffd(8) for further information. SEE ALSO
: nifftmt(7), nr(7), niffconfig(8), niffd(8) delim off niff(7)
