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April 10, 2007

Watch Your Network Play Space Invaders

Nick Gonzalez

27 comments »

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.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. coRank

    April 10th, 2007 at 3:12 pm

  2. Orkut » Blog Archive » Network Monitoring, Space Invaders Style

    September 1st, 2007 at 6:10 am

  3. bsod » Blog Archive » La red como un vídeo juego

    February 23rd, 2008 at 7:13 pm

Comments

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  1. Jim Goodman

    April 10th, 2007 at 2:26 pm

    This is like that bad Angelina Jolie movie, “Hackers” where they “bring down a Gibson”…. :-)

  2. beng

    April 10th, 2007 at 2:26 pm

    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.

  3. Josh

    April 10th, 2007 at 2:53 pm

    Kind of reminds me of Packet Garden: http://packetgarden.com/

  4. Andy

    April 10th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

    There’s always peep (http://sourceforge.net/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.

  5. matthew

    April 10th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    a little overdramatic for network traffic

  6. n00dles

    April 10th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    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.praystation.com/pou.....index.html

  7. Lex Murphy

    April 10th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

    It’s a UNIX system! I know this!

  8. DaveT

    April 10th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    It’s about time that someone starts thinking beyond green/yellow/red icons connected with lines.

  9. John R

    April 10th, 2007 at 4:49 pm

    Good one Lex :)

  10. Mousefinger

    April 10th, 2007 at 5:17 pm

    TRON!!!

    Good to see we’ve progressed from 1982 Tron days to…erm, more Tron.

    ~.^

  11. pallet jack

    April 10th, 2007 at 10:44 pm

    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

  12. tech

    April 11th, 2007 at 1:33 am

    i’ll try it,
    thnx Nick…

  13. F-Addicted

    April 11th, 2007 at 1:49 am

    It smells like hakers are in the neibourghood

  14. Matt

    April 11th, 2007 at 3:50 am

    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.

  15. Joe

    April 11th, 2007 at 5:20 am

    They could have used more special effects ;-)

  16. Television

    April 11th, 2007 at 5:49 am

    So they don’t intend to let anyone else use it…but rather they’re just showing it off?

  17. Chris Mitchell

    April 11th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    …..or you can play Space Invaders online….http://www.cavenger.com/si.php

  18. Chris Mitchell

    April 11th, 2007 at 8:13 am

    …..or you can play Space Invaders online….http://www.cavenger.com/si.php

  19. Jimmydunes

    April 11th, 2007 at 9:09 am

    I won’t be happy until I can monitor my network traffic by smell. “Oh no… Is that burning hair?”

  20. Render Manager @ UK studoi

    April 11th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    I’d love to see this process the traffic from our 200cpu render farm at full tilt!

  21. glenneroo

    April 12th, 2007 at 4:44 am

    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!!”

  22. neo-lycan

    April 12th, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    This is more like the original vision of cyberspace described by William Gibson (in his sprawl series, particularly Neuromancer) than the movie Hackers.

  23. Yuzle!

    April 22nd, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    Second life.. for packets!

  24. Motorcycle Guy

    April 27th, 2007 at 7:09 am

    Haha that is awesome!

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