One of my coworkers and I remember some sort of Matrix screensaver like program for Linux that used tcpdump to show network activity. Anyone know what this program is? I'd love to implement it here at work to see how busy our lab network is.

Not specifically, but I do remember a piece of open source called 'Peep' a 'Network Auralizer' (!).

It looked at the network traffic and depending on what it saw it would generate sounds - so you could use hearing to determine how much traffic was going on - very cool, but also highly annoying.

I'll see if I can dig out a link..

*edit* Here it is: http://peep.sourceforge.net/doc.html

Paul

It should look out for properly formatted MP3 frames going past, and then play those....

You forgot this attachment.

Now that's a great idea! Could sound pretty horrific though..

It shouldn't be that hard to do actually. I'm writing a network sniffer at the moment and the IPv4 portion is pretty simple. Writing the GUI is the bit that has taken me the longest to do.
It'll probably end up sounding horrible as all of the streams will be mixed up however. But this may improve the music depending on your tastes

I think I saw a paper on it at LISA. It was sort of amusing, though I could never imagine running it.

Solaris's snoop network sniffer has had this for many years:

-a Listen to packets on /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).

(from the snoop man page)

tcpdump > /dev/dsp works nicely on linux.

Now when I were a lad...

There was a number of mainframes with a speaker lead tied to one of the higher address bus wires. You could hear when your program got stuck in an endless loop by the random noise changing to a steady tone.

Peter Langston's first music program, MUTRAN, actually worked by carefully timed loops that would get picked up by an AM radio next to the computer.

Yeah, but it's not decoding the MP3 frames and actually giving you snatches of music, though, is it?

One of the mainframes my Dad worked on could be made to play tunes using it's line printer's print head.

Edit: ah look, he wasn't making it up either
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/199812/1998.12.13.10.html

One of the mainframes my Dad worked on could be made to play tunes using it's line printer's print head.

Cool!

In the same vein - here's some more of Peter's work - this time [mis]using early-80's DecTalk speech synthesizers:
http://www.langston.com/SVM.html

Yes but Peep makes *nice* noises - listen to the sample MP3's.

I don't believe that the command you showed would sound pretty in any way.

Paul

One of the mainframes my Dad worked on could be made to play tunes using it's line printer's print head.

Apparently The HP 5100 scanner plays "Ode to Joy" on it's scan head if you hold down the scan button while plugging it in.

Gareth

I have an HP 4c flatbed scanner that you could download a utility to compose tunes on it! I was very worried it would be bad for the scanner... ironically, my isa scsi cards went obsolete before anything went wrong with the scanner.