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>Chapter 9. Background Operation</H1
><P
> IPTraf-ng's facilities can be placed in the background solely for
logging. When running in the background, it doesn't display any output
on the screen, and doesn't receive input
from the keyboard, and drops you back to the shell.</P
><P
> Before starting a statistical facility in the background, configure
IPTraf-ng in the usual way (set filters, add TCP/UDP ports, etc).</P
><P
> Once that's done, exit all instances of IPTraf-ng on the system, then
invoke IPTraf-ng from the command line with the parameter
to start the facility you want, the timeout (<SAMP
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-t</SAMP
>) parameter
if you wish, and the <SAMP
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-B</SAMP
> parameter to actually daemonize the program.
For example, to run the IP traffic monitor in the
background for all interfaces, issue the command</P
><PRE
CLASS="SYNOPSIS"
>iptraf-ng -i all -B</PRE
><P
> To run the detailed interface statistics
on interface <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>eth0</TT
> for 5 minutes
in the background:</P
><PRE
CLASS="SYNOPSIS"
>iptraf-ng -d eth0 -t 5 -B</PRE
><P
> If the timeout parameter is not specified, the facility
will run until the process receives a USR2 signal. To stop a facility in
the background, do a</P
><PRE
CLASS="SYNOPSIS"
>ps x</PRE
><P
> at the command line, and find the process id (pid) of the iptraf-ng process
you're looking for. Then send that process a USR2 signal with the kill
command:</P
><PRE
CLASS="SYNOPSIS"
>kill -USR2 pid</PRE
><P
> Since IPTraf-ng cannot send error messages to the terminal, all
messages are written to the file daemon.log in the
IPTraf-ng logging directory.</P
><P
> The <SAMP
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-B</SAMP
> parameter automatically enables logging regardless of its configured
setting. The parameter is ignored if not used with one of the parameters
to start a facility from the command line.</P
><P
> The log file can be specified with the <SAMP
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-L</SAMP
> command-line parameter. If
this parameter is not specified, the default log file name for the
facility will be used (see the descriptions of the
facilities above for the default log name patterns).
If you don't specify an path, the log file will be placed in
<TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/var/log/iptraf-ng</TT
>.</P
><P
> The logging interval for all facilities (except the IP traffic monitor) can also be overriden
with the <SAMP
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-I</SAMP
> command-line parameter.</P
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