# cannot get flows (again)



## fluca1978 (Oct 14, 2013)

I'm having again problems with the network flows. I'm running 9.1-RELEASE, and the last week I had at last my machine with net-mgmt/flow-tools and net-mgmt/softflowd working fine. 
The only thing that changed is that today I did a full portsnap(8) update, and now even if I've my collector and sensor running on the network cards I cannot get any flow information.

Here are the processes as launched from rc.conf:


```
# ps -auxww | grep flow
nobody    10495   0.0  0.6  9628 1452 ??  Is    5:15PM   0:00.00 /usr/local/sbin/softflowd -i em0 -n 192.168.1.222:8888 -m 16000 -p /var/run/softflowd.em0.pid -c /var/run/softflowd.em0.ctl -t maxlife=300
nobody    10502   0.0  0.6  9628 1452 ??  Is    5:15PM   0:00.00 /usr/local/sbin/softflowd -i em1 -n 192.168.1.222:4444 -m 16000 -p /var/run/softflowd.em1.pid -c /var/run/softflowd.em1.ctl -t maxlife=300
flowtools 10514   0.0  0.6  9788 1468 ??  Ss    5:15PM   0:00.07 /usr/local/bin/flow-capture -E 2G -n 287 -N 3 -S 5 -w /var/db/flows/em1 -p /var/run/flow-capture/flow-capture.pid 192.168.1.222/0.0.0.0/4444
flowtools 10521   0.0  0.6  9788 1504 ??  Ss    5:15PM   0:00.08 /usr/local/bin/flow-capture -E 2G -n 287 -N 3 -S 5 -w /var/db/flows/em0 -p /var/run/flow-capture/flow-capture.pid 192.168.1.222/0.0.0.0/8888
```


Now, since no file was created in the /var/db/flows/em* directory any more, I checked the exports from the sensor, and got what I suspect is the problem:


```
# softflowctl -c /var/run/softflowd.em1.ctl statistics
softflowd[10502]: Accumulated statistics:
[color="Red"]Number of active flows: 0
Packets processed: 0
[/color]Fragments: 0
Ignored packets: 0 (0 non-IP, 0 too short)
Flows expired: 0 (0 forced)
Flows exported: 0 in 0 packets (0 failures)
Packets received by libpcap: 614
Packets dropped by libpcap: 0
Packets dropped by interface: 0
```

The em1 interface is the one I'm connected to the machine via ssh(1), and therefore should be generating traffic!
I've tried to deinstall and reinstall both packages from ports, but nothing changed. 
Of course, flow-capture(1) is running fine, and it seems softflowd(1) is able to speak to it too:


```
# netstat -n
...
udp4       0      0 192.168.1.222.8888   *.*                    
udp4       0      0 192.168.1.222.4444   *.*                    
udp4       0      0 192.168.1.222.53342  192.168.1.222.4444   
udp4       0      0 192.168.1.222.53000  192.168.1.222.8888
```

This is driving me crazy, any help is appreciated.


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## fluca1978 (Oct 15, 2013)

I think I've solved, but maybe someone with more experience can comment on this: I've seen that if the packet captured by libpcacp keeps under a certain threshold, no matter how many time it passes, net-mgmt/softflowd will not export it and, consequently, net-mgmt/flow-capture will not account it.
In my trials I was connecting to the machine via ssh(1) and launching several commands, but no processed packets were reported; launching a quite big scp process made the whole packets to be recorded as flow.
However, I don't see any of the above specified in the softflowd(8) documentation, any comment?


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