pcapsipdump – Dump SIP Signalling and RTP Streams Per Call Leg into Separate Pcap Files

For a VoIP administrator, in order to properly diagnose and troubleshoot issues sometimes, you need the ability to go to be able to go back in time and dig deep within packet traces to get to the heart of the problem. Unfortunately, this means following the NSA’s policy and doing blanket data collection if you can handle the disk storage requirements.

Sure if the problem is easily reproducible, then you can either do a SIP trace in your VoIP software to get just the signalling data or if you need the RTP streams too, you can use “tcpdump” to capture the packets and avoid this scenario altogether but that isn’t always the case and using tcpdump certainly does have it’s limitations.

Capture (pcap) files get huge and harder to work with, you have to create filters to find the data you need, the list goes on and on. Of course, there are some helpful switches you can use to try to get around this when trying to capture data for long periods of time but then you still run into the problem of needing to run the application as a daemon, rotating log files, and then you still have to dig extensively for the data you need.
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Install MySQL Activity Report from Source

MySQL Activity Report is a handy database reporting tool that uses RRD (Round Robin Database) to display hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly graphs and gives helpful performance tuning recommendations for your MySQL installation. Here are the steps to install it from source on Ubuntu Server 12.04.3 while logged in as root. This assumes that you have the build-essentials, header files, etc necessary to build software already installed.

1. Change into your local source directory

cd /usr/local/src

2. Download the source files for rrdtool and mysqlard

wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.4.8.tar.gz
wget http://gert.sos.be/downloads/mysqlar/mysqlard-1.0.0.tar.gz

3. Unzip the files

tar -zxvf rrdtool-1.4.8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf mysqlard-1.0.0.tar.gz

4. Change into the rrd directory

cd rrdtool-1.4.8

5. Install dependencies

apt-get install libpango1.0-dev libxml2-dev

6. Build rrdtool (will install to the /opt/rrdtool-1.4.8 directory)
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