Inverted Reality

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A new lease of life for an old Mac Mini

I've got an old Mac Mini laying around, I may have found a use for it.. I've thrown it up in the cabinet with my other network goodies and added it to the network as a squid proxy server and fax server. Mac Mini: G4 1.4, 1GB RAM, 80GB hdd, fax/modem. no wifi/bt. Leopard. it's headless, I can administer it from my other machines using screen sharing, which is nice. I'm running "SquidMan" for OS X, which is a GUI squid configurator, the squid daemon comes with it. nice. Configuration is fast and easy. I've loaded up 'sarg' so I can monitor the traffic/logs if I like... (not important to me) I've turned on 'fax sharing' for the internal modem, and plugged it in with the ADSL on a splitter/filter. Maybe I'll come up with some other things for the mac mini to do... I'd like to get a little comms cabinet and tidy this up at some stage too. any other uses? My NAS does the filesharing, etc.... I'll have to see what I can come up with :) What I'd really like is an app/tool that allows me to log usage of a network interface, to hostname/IP level. EG how much data on port 110 for host abc, etc. or how much total data through a network interface for IP xxx... hrmmm. I had a great Linux app that monitored this through IPTABLES once upon a time. James

Posted July 23, 2009