flowtop(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | USAGE EXAMPLE | CONFIG FILES | BUGS | LEGAL | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON | COLOPHON

FLOWTOP(8)                 netsniff-ng toolkit                FLOWTOP(8)

NAME         top

       flowtop - top-like netfilter TCP/UDP/SCTP/DCCP/ICMP(v6) flow
       tracking

SYNOPSIS         top

       flowtop { [options] }

DESCRIPTION         top

       flowtop is a top-like connection tracking tool that can run on an
       end host or small home router. It is able to present TCP,
       UDP/UDP-lite, SCTP, DCCP, and ICMP(v6) flows that have been
       collected by the kernel's netfilter connection tracking
       framework, thus no packet capturing in user space needs to be
       done.

       flowtop is able to give you a quick overview of current
       connections on your local system, e.g. for debugging purposes or
       to answer questions like:

           * If you access website X, what other connections are being
       opened in
             the background that I'm not aware of?
           * What connections are active that pass one's router?
           * I have this proprietary binary Y, to where does it connect?
           * To which countries am I sending data?
           * Are there any suspicious background connections on my
       machine?
           * How many active connections does binary Y have?
           * How long are connections active already?
           * At which rate am I sending/receiving data?

       The following information will be presented in flowtop's output:

           * Application name and PID when run on local machine
           * Reverse DNS for source and destination
           * Geo-location information (country, city)
           * Used protocols (IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP, SCTP, ICMP, ...)
           * Flow port's service name heuristic
           * Transport protocol state machine information
           * Byte/packet counters (if they are enabled)
           * Connection duration (if timestamping is enabled)
           * Flow send/receive rate (if byte/packet counters are
       enabled)

       In order for flowtop to work, netfilter must be active and
       running on your machine, thus kernel-side connection tracking is
       active. If netfilter is not running, you can activate it with
       iptables(8):

           iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state ESTABLISHED -j
           ACCEPT

           iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j
           ACCEPT

       or by loading the following kernel modules:

           modprobe nf_conntrack_ipv4

           modprobe nf_conntrack_ipv6

       To dump byte/packet counters flowtop enables the sysctl(8)
       parameter net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_acct via:

           echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_acct

       and resets it to the previously set value on exit. These counters
       will only be active on connections which were created after
       accounting was enabled. Thus, to have these counters be active
       all the time the parameter should be enabled after the system is
       up. To automatically enable it, sysctl.conf(8) or sysctl.d(8)
       might be used.

       To calculate the connection duration flowtop enables the
       sysctl(8) parameter net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_timestamp via:

           echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_timestamp

       and resets it to the previously set value on exit.

       flowtop's intention is just to get a quick look over your active
       connections.  If you want logging support, have a look at
       netfilter's conntrack(8) tools instead.

OPTIONS         top

       -4, --ipv4
              Display IPv4 flows. That is the default when flowtop is
              started without any arguments.

       -6, --ipv6
              Display IPv6 flows. That is the default when flowtop is
              started without any arguments.

       -T, --tcp
              Display TCP flows. That is the default when flowtop is
              started without any arguments.

       -U, --udp
              Display UDP and UDP-lite flows.

       -D, --dccp
              Display DCCP flows.

       -I, --icmp
              Display ICMP version 4 and version 6 flows.

       -S, --sctp
              Display SCTP flows.

       -n, --no-dns
              Don't perform hostname lookup. Only numeric addresses will
              be shown for flow endpoints.

       -G, --no-geoip
              Don't perform GeoIP lookup. No geographical information
              will be shown for flow endpoints.

       -s, --show-src
              Also show source information of the flow, not only
              destination information.

       -b, --bits
              Show flow rates in bits per second instead of bytes per
              second.

       -u, --update
              The built-in database update mechanism will be invoked to
              get Maxmind's latest database. To configure search
              locations for databases, the file /etc/netsniff-
              ng/geoip.conf contains possible addresses. Thus, to save
              bandwidth or for mirroring Maxmind's databases (to bypass
              their traffic limit policy), different hosts or IP
              addresses can be placed into geoip.conf, separated by a
              newline.

       -t <time>, --interval <time>
              Flow info refresh interval in seconds, default is 1s.

       -v, --version
              Show version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Show user help and exit.

USAGE EXAMPLE         top

       flowtop
              Default ncurses output for flowtop that tracks IPv4, IPv6
              flows for TCP.

       flowtop -46UTDISs
              This example enables the maximum display options for
              flowtop.

CONFIG FILES         top

       Files under /etc/netsniff-ng/ can be modified to extend flowtop's
       service resolution and lookup information.

           * tcp.conf - TCP port/services map
           * udp.conf - UDP port/services map
           * geoip.conf - GeoIP database mirrors

BUGS         top

       With a fairly high rate of connection tracking updates, flowtop
       can become unresponsive for short periods of time while
       scrolling. The right fix would be to replace flowtop's connection
       management backend with a better design with respect to the
       locking approach. This is still on the "todo" list.

LEGAL         top

       flowtop is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.0.

HISTORY         top

       flowtop was originally written for the netsniff-ng toolkit by
       Daniel Borkmann. It is currently maintained by Tobias Klauser
       <tklauser@distanz.ch> and Daniel Borkmann
       <dborkma@tik.ee.ethz.ch>.

SEE ALSO         top

       netsniff-ng(8), trafgen(8), mausezahn(8), ifpps(8), bpfc(8),
       astraceroute(8), curvetun(8), iptables(8), sysctl(8),
       sysctl.conf(8), sysctl.d(8)

AUTHOR         top

       Manpage was written by Daniel Borkmann.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the Linux netsniff-ng toolkit project. A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs,
       can be found at http://netsniff-ng.org/.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the netsniff-ng (a free Linux networking
       toolkit) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://netsniff-ng.org/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this
       manual page, send it to netsniff-ng@googlegroups.com.  This page
       was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/netsniff-ng/netsniff-ng⟩ on 2024-06-14.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2023-02-01.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux                         03 March 2013                   FLOWTOP(8)

Pages that refer to this page: astraceroute(8)bpfc(8)curvetun(8)ifpps(8)mausezahn(8)netsniff-ng(8)trafgen(8)