Developing an Argus client

[Harry Bock]

Hey Carter,

Sorry for the late reply.  I've been extremely busy for the last week and
haven't had a whole lot of time to work on this.

That's fine that you can't integrate it right now; in the meantime, I've
cobbled together a temporary solution, where I create a shared library of my
wrappers that directly includes argus_client.a and argus_common.a using
libtool, and that seems to be working fine on Linux systems (although
libtool complains it's nonportable, I'm not concerned about it at this
time).

A few questions on using the library.
  - Some of the data in ArgusRecordStruct is in network byte order, and some
is not - for example, in struct ArgusFlow, flow->ip_flow.ip_src and ip_dst
are both in NBO, but sport and dport are both in HBO.  Is this anomaly
common?
 - How complicated is the Argus server protocol (version 3)?  I'm interested
in implementing it entirely in Lisp, which would give me some more
flexibility data-structure wise.  Does the on-disk format Argus uses match
the protocol well? I'm not sure if I'll do it, but I want to know what I'm
getting myself into first :)

Thanks,
Harry

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:

> Hey Harry,If you want shared libraries, and it has to run on 21 platforms,
> libtool is the only way to go.  I haven't put it in, because, up until
> about 5-6 years ago, it was  hard to have a make file that would
> do the right thing on Linux, Solaris, IRIX, Mach, UNICOS, all the
> BSD's, AIX, HPUX, etc....  Now its time to do this.
>
> Also, the library routines are not well documented (no
> user serviceable software parts inside), so easier to avoid
> the hard part if you just don't let them get to the routines ;o)
>
> I already have hand cobbled a set of make files that do the right
> thing.  I just have to integrate the changes into configure.in, which
> will take some time, with my schedule, maybe a month, so if you
> need it now, you may have to do something on your side.
>
> Carter
>
> On May 22, 2009, at 10:32 AM, Harry Bock wrote:
>
> Hey Carter,
>
> Unfortunately, I don't have very much experience with autotools, just some
> basic stuff with autoconf/automake, and none at all with GNU libtool.  I
> prefer CMake for projects like this, but that doesn't help :)
>
> I hope this change won't cause any headaches for you; I really appreciate
> the help!
>
> Harry
>
> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com>wrote:
>
>> Hey Harry,I don't want to keep you from doing anything, but I think I
>> should probably
>> do this thing that you are seeking.
>>
>> Do you have any experience with gnu's libtool?
>>
>> Carter
>>
>> On May 20, 2009, at 2:19 PM, Harry Bock wrote:
>>
>> Thanks again for your help Carter; I've fixed the reference to QoSient on
>> our project page and
>> have progressed a bit more since my last email.
>>
>> In my current copy of the argus-clients source tree, I've broken Periscope
>> out into its own directory, akin to ramysql and co., with a slightly
>> modified Makefile.in.  I'm building a small framework atop Argus to make it
>> more convenient for non-C programs to access data within Argus records, and
>> I've added a callback layer on top of the current scheme for
>> RaParseComplete/RaArgusInputComplete/etc., since the report-generating part
>> of Periscope won't be directly compiled against the Argus client libraries.
>>
>> The most critical thing that I need to do at this point is to build a
>> shared lib of the Argus client library; I know how to do this for autotools
>> when the input files are for automake, but not for pure autoconf.  Any
>> suggestions on how to do this without breaking linking the other
>> applications to the static Argus libraries?  That would make it extremely
>> easy to do something similar to:
>>
>> gcc periscope.c -o periscope -I/usr/include/argus-client -largus_client
>> -largus_common -largus_event
>>
>> As shared library support might be useful to other developers working on
>> Argus clients, I'd suggest enabling this support in the default distribution
>> of argus-clients, so users can build applications like Periscope against
>> their distribution's build of Argus without needing a copy of these
>> modifications to the vanilla source tree.  I'd assume it'd be proper to make
>> the initial SOVERSION 3.0.2 for libargus_client, etc.?
>>
>> Harry
>>
>>
>>
>


-- 
Harry Bock
Software Developer, Package Maintainer
OSHEAN, Inc.
Email: harry at oshean.org
PGP Key ID: 546CC353
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