The Status Menu

The status menu provides a set of pages that display information in both textual and graphic views about various daemons and services running on the Connect Switchboard. No configuration option is available in this module, which only shows the current and recent status of the Connect Switchboard.

The following items appear in the sub-menu on the left-hand side of the screen, each giving detailed status information on some functionalities of the Connect Switchboard:

• System status–current status of resources

• Network status–configuration of network interfaces, routing table, ARP cache

• Services status–current status of services running on Connect Switchboard

• System graphs–graphs of resource usage

• Traffic Graphs–graphs of bandwidth usage

• Connections–list of all open TCP/IP connections

• VPN connections–list of all OpenVPN connections

System status

This page gives a number of information about the running system, organised into three boxes: General information, Disks, and Memory In more details, these are the information presented in each box, which are usually the output of a Linux command. The boxes can be expanded and collapsed by clicking on the or icons, respectively.

General information

This section contains information about basic characteristics of the Connect Switchboard:

• Machine. The CPU model and clock frequency.

• Architecture. The architecture of the appliance, which on Endian appliance is 64 bit (x86_64). It may be different on virtual or software appliances installed on non-Intel CPUs.

• Release. The version of the Endian software installed on the Appliance.

• Uptime. How much time has passed since the last boot of the Connect Switchboard.

• Kernel version. The version of the Linux kernel installed on the Connect Switchboard.

Disks

The information contained in this box are the same as those seen in the dashboard’s Disks Plugin (Menubar ‣ System ‣ Dashboard).

Memory

The information contained in this box are the same as those seen in the dashboard’s Memory Plugin (Menubar ‣ System ‣ Dashboard).

Network status

This page contains several information about the running state of the network interfaces. Three boxes are present on the page: Interfaces, Routing table entries, and the ARP table entries. In more details, these are the information presented in each box, which are usually the output of a Linux command. The boxes can be expanded and collapsed by clicking on the or icons, respectively.

Interfaces

The first box uses the output of the ip addr show command to provide for each network interface the status -either UP or DOWN, the assigned IP address, and additional communication parameters like the amount of the received and sent traffic and the number of possible errors or dropped packets. The NIC shown are either Ethernet interfaces or bridges, while VLANs and bonded network interfaces are not shown.

Routing table entries

The kernel routing table, as provided by the route -n command. Typically, there should be one line per active interface, which correctly routes the traffic within the zones served by the Connect Switchboard, plus a default route (recognisable by the 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 Destination field) that allow the traffic to reach the Internet.

There can be more than one entry per interface in the case of the default gateway or in case some special host in one local network acts as gateway to another local network that is not directly served by the Connect Switchboard.

ARP table entries

In the last box data about the arp table, extracted from the output of the arp -n command, are displayed. For each entry, the IP address is shown, along with its corresponding MAC address and device.

Services status

Services

This box shows the status of each service installed on the Connect Switchboard, marked as either STOPPED or RUNNING. A click on the Log button on the right of the status will open a panel underneath to see the service’s detailed status, according to the systemctl status <servicename> command.

System graphs

The graphs displayed in this page present the usage of the following CPU, memory, and swap resources, each in a different box that can be minimised or expanded by clicking on the and icons.

Each graph uses colours, explained in the legend, to highlight its various components of the resource, and shows a summary of the minimum, maximum, average, and current values of each resource.

Note

The nan (short for “Not A Number”) string that is sometimes displayed in the summaries means that not enough data have been collected to calculate the usage of the selected resource. It can appear for example in the Usage per Year graphs when the Connect Switchboard has been used for only a few weeks.

In detail, the three boxes in the main page display the following information.

CPU graph

This box shows the CPU usage of the Connect Switchboard, grouped into the sum of CPU time per status of the processes.

Memory graph

This graph shows the RAM memory usage. The following colours are used to denote the of memory:

Swap graph

The usage of the swap area, located on the hard disk, is displayed in this box. The colours used are:

See also

A good description of the linux memory management can be found here.

Traffic graphs

Network traffic graphs

This page initially contains a single option.

Interface

Select from the drop down menu the interface whose traffic should be shown.

Note

Only one interface at a time is allowed.

Once the interface or bridge has been selected, five graphs of the selected interface will appear, displaying traffic of the last hour, day, week, month, and year.

Below each graph, the summary of the average, maximum, and current amount of data transmitted and received is displayed and updated in real time.

Connections

Connections

This page shows a table containing the list of current connections from, to, or going through the Connect Switchboard. The data shown here are devised by the kernel conntrack table. The following colours are employed in the table and used as the background of the cells in the table to denote the source and destination of the connection.

• Green, red, orange, and blue are the zones governed by the Connect Switchboard.

• Black is used for connections involving the firewall, including daemons and services, like e.g., SSH or web accesses).

• Purple shows connections using VPN or IPsec.

The data displayed in the table are the following.

Source IP

The IP address from which the connection has started.

Port

The port from which the connection has started.

Destination IP

The destination IP of the connection.

Port

The destination port of the connection.

Protocol

The protocol used in the connection, which is typically tcp or udp.

Status

The current status of the connection, meaningful only for TCP connections. They are defined in RFC 793, significant states are ESTABLISHED (connection is active), TIME_WAIT (connection is closing) CLOSE (no connection).

Expired

How long will the connection remain in that particular status.

Note

To refresh the page, click on the icon located on the top right corner of the table.

VPN connections

This page shows the users connected to the Connect Switchboard using a VPN, either OpenVPN or IPsec. The table shows the following information about them:

• The username which the client uses for the connection.

• The service they rely on for the connection (OpenVPN, L2TP, IPsec Xauth and so on).

• The time when the connection started (Connected since).

• The Assigned IP of the client.

• The Remote IP of the client.

• The possible Actions that can be carried out on the connection, which currently is only to forcibly disconnect the client.