Internet Visualizer

Source repository for the Internet Visualizer (inetvis) tool.

This project is based off of the original 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

Notes

This project was originally written in Qt3 and compiled to 32-bit code, it has since been ported to Qt5, and 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 the software please do the following:

1. Download the latest release archive from the releases page.
2. Extract the archive which will be called something like inetvis-2.1.1.tgz
3. Change into the extracted directory, something like inetvis-2.1.1
4. Run the install_inetvis.sh shell script to install the software.
   1. This script will: install the software to /opt/inetvis-<version>
   2. Create a symlink directory /opt/inetvis for convenience
   3. Copy across 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 inetvis binary allowing for monitoring packets on local host 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 also be in the menu system of your distribution.

You should now be able to run the inetvis binary from the command line, as it will be in your path, or you can run it from the Ubuntu menu system, where it will show up as an item. 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 at any time.

Building InetVis and Running

In order to build InetVis in your own VM please consider the following guidelines:

Building InetVis is relatively straight forward. Begin by doing the following:

1. Update your system:
   • sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade, finally 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 if you haven't already.

1. Clone the github repo into the inetvis directory:
   • git clone git@github.com:yestinj/inetvis.git
2. Change into the inetvis directory, and then change to src.
3. Checkout whichever branch you want to build, i.e. master or develop.
   • git checkout master

Finally, build the inetvis binary:

1. qmake
2. make

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

You may now run inetvis by simply 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 host for packets.

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.