NetQoS has a little something to bring video game-style drama to the hum drum task of monitoring your system traffic. Their program, Netcosm monitors the traffic flowing across your routers and remasters that data into entertaining clashes of good and evil data packets like the one you see above. The only question is whether your system admin with find it more entertaining to see your system get “Slashdotted” than do anything about it.
Netcosm is a product of NetQoS Performance Labs and currently only running on their servers, but they do have a nifty FAQ where you can ask them about all the fun they’re having.
This is like that bad Angelina Jolie movie, “Hackers” where they “bring down a Gibson”….
Reminds of the old UniCenter network management program that was all 3D and cool (at the time).
Similarly, this is both neat and utterly (after neatness wears of) useless at the same time.
Kind of reminds me of Packet Garden: http://packetgarden.com/
There’s always peep (http://sourcefo.../projects/peep/), which plays sounds based on network traffic. The theory being that one can recognize “normal” and “abnormal” network state based on the ambient noise it makes. There are themes like traffic and woodland animal sounds. Ideally, you run this in the background, rather than watching it closely.
a little overdramatic for network traffic
Reminds me of some of the stuff Joshua Davis was working on several years ago (2001, boy do I feel old), when he built a Flash interface to the Carnivore (http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/) project… chk out http://ps3.pray...2001/index.html
It’s a UNIX system! I know this!
It’s about time that someone starts thinking beyond green/yellow/red icons connected with lines.
Good one Lex
TRON!!!
Good to see we’ve progressed from 1982 Tron days to…erm, more Tron.
~.^
so do we see a business model?
– I thought people stop paying for screen savers long ago
-man Im am most def being mean tonight /RB
i’ll try it,
thnx Nick…
It smells like hakers are in the neibourghood
This is much better than staring at a plasma screen with a bunch of boring icons on it. I would use it in a hearbeat, even if it is just eye candy. At least it would keep your interest.
They could have used more special effects
So they don’t intend to let anyone else use it…but rather they’re just showing it off?
…..or you can play Space Invaders online….http://www.cavenger.com/si.php
…..or you can play Space Invaders online….http://www.cavenger.com/si.php
I won’t be happy until I can monitor my network traffic by smell. “Oh no… Is that burning hair?”
I’d love to see this process the traffic from our 200cpu render farm at full tilt!
Maybe they should license the Half Life engine for it and get some proper effects. Then we’ll see mod-sites popup, so you can add a Star Wars, or nekkid babes mod, depending on preference… (with a boss key of course)…
Then before you know it, net admins around the world will be upgrading their gfx cards to the latest and greatest 3D-capable SLI rigs with the reasoning: “We need to be able to monitor net traffic properly and in real-time! These crap Intel 9xx cards that came packaged in our generic boxes lag too much and we’re not sure if we’re losing traffic or if they just can’t render the “packets” fast enough!!”
This is more like the original vision of cyberspace described by William Gibson (in his sprawl series, particularly Neuromancer) than the movie Hackers.
Second life.. for packets!
Haha that is awesome!