Network status

The Network status page informs about all hosts connected to your Internet Gate. You can see their online status, resource usage, IP address, name, etc. The more PCs you have connected to your Internet Gate, the more useful the Network status page becomes.

The Network status page is mostly automatic. New equipment added to your network will pop up automatically in the connected hosts list.

4 seconds after you open the Network status page it refreshes once. Bandwidth usage is measured during those 4 seconds, and thereafter shown static. To update the values you need to refresh the page.

To always see the latest information, and to see the trafic bars in real time, click “Refresh automatically” to start automatic updating of the page.

Lists all hosts (equipment) on your networks. The list is based upon current data in the ARP, route, DHCP, DNS and flow tables of your SafeGate. If new equipment is connected to your network it will automatically pop up on this list as soon as it communicates with the Internet Gate (tries to connect to the Internet).

Displays status of this unit's active interfaces.

• WAN interfaces are listed above the back side image of the unit.
• LAN interfaces are listed below the back side image of the unit.
• Interfaces not listed have no active clients connected.

The traffic bar for an interface shows ALL Ethernet traffic going through that interface (both send and receive), including broadcasts, multicasts, control packets, etc.

The bars in front of hosts and interfaces indicate traffic. Position mouse pointer on bar to view numerical values of bits/second and flows.

Length of the bar indicates the amount of data trafic to/from the host. The data trafic is measured in BITS per second IP trafic (divide with 8 to get BYTES per second), and it is an average value of the traffic since the last refresh of the page.

Thickness of the bar indicates number of flows open to this host.

TIP: Klick “Refresh automatically…” to see the data trafic in real time.

The scale of the bars is roughly logarithmic. The bigger the bar the higher the value – but a bar slightly larger than another can in fact have double the value.

To see the true numerical values place the mouse pointer over the bars. To see resource usage in detail click on the host icon to open the Host info page.

Blue bar: nr of flows

By default the SafeGate has 2000 flow s available for usage. Each data stream through the firewall consumes one of those flows. If you have for example 10 PCs connected to your SafeGate then each of them should open no more than 200 flows to ensure there are enough flows for all of your PCs. If a PC has as many flows open as its share then its blue bar is exactly half of the available space in size.

Green bar: nr of bytes transferred

During normal operations a flow is opened through the firewall, some data is transferred through it, and then it is closed again. Instead of displaying an ever-changing bytes-per-second value, the more stable bytes-transferred value is shown. The larger the green bar the more bytes have been transferred to/from the host through its currently open flows.

If you for example have 10 PCs connected to your SafeGate and a total of 8000KB of data has been transferred, then each PC should have transferred an average of 800KB. If a PC has transferred more than that its green bar will be larger than half of the available space in size.

The icon of the host indicates its online status:

Clicking on the Refresh… button makes the SafeGate send an ARP request to each connected host.

PC A is answering to the ARP request, thus it is online (turned on). All online equipment answers to ARP requests, but ARP requests cannot get through gateways.

As soon as PC B tries to access the Internet it will automatically pop up on the Connected hosts list.

PC C is offline (turned off) – it does not respond to ARP requests. As response to ARP requests is mandatory, no response can only mean the PC is turned off, crashed or in some other way disabled – it is offline.

Gateways connect networks together: gateway D is connected to two subnets, and allows traffic to flow between them. Gateway D is online – it is itself answering to ARP requests.

However, as gateways do not allow ARP requests through (gateway D blocks the ARP requests), there is no easy way to decide if PCs E , F and G are online or not. That is why they are displayed as “remote hosts”, without any online status specified.

By clicking on the host icon of PC E in the Connected hosts list a PING request is sent to it. PING requests are allowed through by gateways, but it is not mandatory for hosts to answer to them. Thus gateway D allows the PING request through, and if PC E answers to it then we know that PC E is online.

But answering to PING is not mandatory: a host not answering to PING could be offline – or be online, but simply ignoring the PING request. Thus there seems no difference between PCs F and G : neither answers to PING – but while PC F is indeed turned off, G is actually online, but ignores the PING requests!

If a gateway itself is not responding to ARP requests then the gateway is offline – neither it, nor any PCs behind it can be reached. Thus as gateway H is offline, PCs J and K cannot be reached, even though they might be turned on.

Hosts that SIP users are registered to have an additional SIP user icon next to them. The SIP user icon indicates that at least one SIP user is registered to that host. To see a list of which users are registered to that host, click on the host icon.

SIP media streams going to or from the host (at the moment the Network status page was opened) are indicated by a small telephone receiver appearing next to the SIP icon. Note that all kind of SIP media streams are indicated this way, not only voice streams.

Conclusions:

gamma is using most flows – much more than its “share”

delta has transferred most bytes

beta has very little resource usage – perhaps just a ping or something minor like that. NOTE!

Just because a host uses more resources than its “share” it is no reason for alarm – hosts are allowed to use more resources than average for shorter or longer periods. It is only if you experience severe bandwidth problems you need to examine which hosts are using most firewall resources on your network.

The IP address of the host. If the address is in italics it has been given by the DHCP server of your SafeGate.

The primary DNS name of the host (the first name in the DNS database with that IP address). If you have entered several names for the same IP address in the DNS database only the first name will be displayed.

If new equipment is connected to your network it will automatically pop up on the list as soon as it tries to connect to the Internet.

If the equipment is using DHCP to collect an IP address, its name will also automatically appear on the page.

Equipment using static IP addresses appears without any name. To manually enter a name for it, click on that host's icon, and into the Hostname field of the appearing Host info page enter the desired name and click Save.

Equipment not connecting to the Internet might not appear automatically in the list. To manually add such equipment enter its IP address and hostname into the fields at the bottom of the Network status page and click Add .

By clicking on the Advanced link at the bottom of the Network status page you will see the routing, ARP and DHCP tables in their raw format.