Purpose

The purpose of nfswatch is to monitor an NFS server.

Method

nfswatch monitors all incoming network traffic to an NFS file server and divides it into several categories. The number and percentage of packets received in each category is displayed on the screen in a continuously updated display. The screen is updated every ten seconds by default.

Status

nfswatch was originally written by Dave Curry and Jeff Mogul. The latest version they distributed dates back from 1996.

Lately, I have become interested in porting this software to the Linux environment and, in agreement with the original authors, have decided to continue the development of nfswatch on SourceForge.

The current version of nfswatch is 4.99.9, and is available from the sourceforge page. The code compiles cleanly and runs on different flavors of Linux, on Solaris, and probably on IRIX. It can now handle NFS v3 calls and is able to decode Linux file handles. I'm currently looking for help to implement IPv6 support.

The latest changes:

• improve file handle decoding on Linux. In particular, filesystems exported through a specified filesystem ID (the fsid= export option) should now be properly handled
• nfswatch should no longer clutter the display with debug info

There is an nfswatch package in Fedora. So installing nfswatch on your Fedora box should be as easy as typing:

• yum install nfswatch

Perspectives

Here is a kind of TODO/wish list:

• Fix writing log files (got broken by NFS v3 stuff)
• Update nfslogsum for NFS v3
• Have it run and tested on more systems
• Have a look at NFS v4
• IPv6 support
• ...

Contact

Please report bugs here

If you'd like to contact me directly (or feel I take a long time to respond to a bug report...) please drop me a line here