Internet Visualizer

Source repository for the Internet Visualizer tool.

This project is based on the work by JP van Riel and Barry Irwin of Rhodes University. Their original work can be found here: www.cs.ru.ac.za/research/g02v2468/inetvis.html

The task of modernising and updating InetVis was the focus of my MSc research which is now complete. The official copy of my thesis on the subject can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/10962/69223

Notes

InetVis was originally written in Qt 3 and compiled to 32-bit code. It has since been ported to Qt 5 and has been updated to compile a 64-bit binary.

The instructions below have all been tested on the current version of Ubuntu, 17.04 64-bit.

Installing and Running InetVis

A compiled version of InetVis is available under the releases section of https://github.com/yestinj/inetvis.

In order to install and run InetVis do the following:

1. Download the latest release archive from the releases page
2. Extract the archive, i.e. inetvis-2.1.1.tgz
3. Change into the extracted directory
4. Run install_inetvis.sh
   1. This script will: install the software to /opt/inetvis-<version>
   2. Create a symlink directory /opt/inetvis
   3. Copy the relevant files to the new directory under /opt.
   4. Place an icon file in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/
   5. Place a desktop file in /usr/share/applications, allowing InetVis to be found in the menu on Ubuntu systems
   6. Create a symlink at /usr/local/bin/inetvis pointing to the main binary.
   7. Set the cap_net_raw, and cap_net_admin=eip capabilities on the binary allowing for monitoring localhost without running as root. $sudo setcap 'CAP_NET_RAW+eip CAP_NET_ADMIN+eip' This needs to generally not be /home which on Debian/ubuntu systems is mounted nosuid
5. If the script completes successfully inetvis should now be in your path and the menu system of your distribution.

You should now be able to run the inetvis binary from the command line. Running from the command line allows you to view console messages produced while the application is running.

Uninstalling InetVis

A convenience script is included in the release archive, namely uninstall_inetvis.sh, which can be used to completely remove InetVis from your system.

Building InetVis

In order to build InetVis yourself take note of the following guidelines:

1. Update your system:
   • sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade, and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
2. Install the following dependencies:
   • sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev qt5-default

It has been noted that the following dependencies were also required on Linux Mint based systems:

sudo apt-get install libqglviewer-dev libqglviewer2

Once the dependencies are installed, clone this repository:

1. Clone the GitHub repo into the inetvis directory:
   • git clone [email protected]:yestinj/inetvis.git
2. Change into the inetvis/src directory

Build the inetvis binary:

1. qmake
2. make

This will result in a new inetvis binary being generated within the src directory.

You may now run inetvis simply by running the generated binary. You will need to either run using sudo, or set packet capture capabilities (see instructions above) on the file in the event that you would like to monitor your local network interfaces.

Have fun! :-)

Development

Development is currently done using Qt Creator.

Qt Creator allows for simple editing of source code, as well as graphical form editing, and can be installed in Debian flavours of Linux by installing the qtcreator package.

Versioning

This software uses Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 (http://semver.org/) as of release v2.0.0.