1. OVERVIEW

  'rate' is a swiss-army-knife commandline traffic analysis tool, designed
to help a network administrator to see what is happening at a router at the
moment. Unlike tcpdump(1), rate uses statistical and stream-oriented methods,
and will never produce an output stream at a speed beyond human perception.
The output is less accurate, however.
  Rate features four different operating modes, designed to perform the
following tasks: estimating overall traffic rates, determining nodes generating
the highest traffic, determining connections and flows generating the
highest traffic and extracting strings from packets.

2. REQUIREMENTS

- gcc, libc...
- libpcap
- 'rate' is currently unable to calculate the datalink layer header size on
  the given interface, so you need to specify it in many cases. Well ...
  it's quite easy to google. For ethernet interfaces it's 14 bytes, which
  is the default.

rate was succefully compiled on following OS'es:
* Linux (shaerrawedd 2.4.19-xfs #7 Fri Oct 4 18:18:38 CEST 2002 i686 unknown)
* FreeBSD (venom 4.6.2-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE-p10 #0: Tue Mar 25
           12:59:45 CET 2003     root@venom:/usr/src/sys/compile/VENOM-3  i386)
* OpenBSD (pantera 3.3 PANTERA#0 i386)
* SunOS (atlantis 5.9 Generic_112233-04 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10)
... however it was tested only on Linux...

3. INSTALLATION

Edit Makefile, and uncomment the right setting for your system.

If libpcap doesn't reside in a standard place on your system, add 
-I/include/path and -L/library path/ flags to CFLAGS and LDFLAGS.

Type 'make' and copy 'rate' to a desired place, /usr/local/bin for instance.
You can also copy the manual page (doc/rate.1) into a manual directory on your
system (eg. /usr/man/man1).

4. USAGE

Consult the manual page (doc/rate.1 and doc/rate.html).

5. OUTPUT

pps = packets per second
bps = bits per second
Bps = bytes per second

1 kpps is 1000 pps
1 Mpps is 1000 kpps
1 Gpps is 1000 Mpps
1 kBps is 1024 bps
1 MBps is 1024 kBps
1 GBps is 1024 MBps
1 kbps is 1024 bps
1 Mbps is 1024 kbps
1 Gbps is 1024 Mbps
(of course for rate.)

6. AUTHOR

Mateusz 'mteg' Golicz <mtg@elsat.net.pl>. Feel free to send any comments,
patches, bugfixes, suggestions, etc. The author is not a native english
speaker, and is aware of the fact that his english is far from perfect. Because
of that, reports on grammar and vocabulary mistakes in this file are
also welcome.

7. LICENSE

GNU GPL, see attached 'LICENSE' file.
