1. OVERVIEW

    'rate' is a swiss-army-knife commandline traffic analysis tool, designed
  to help a network administrator to see what is happening at a router at the
  moment. Unlike tcpdump(1), rate uses statistical and stream-oriented methods,
  and will never produce an output stream at a speed beyond human perception.
  The output is less accurate, however.
    Rate features four different operating modes, designed to perform the
  following tasks: estimating overall traffic rates, determining nodes generating
  the highest traffic, determining connections and flows generating the
  highest traffic and extracting strings from packets.

2. REQUIREMENTS

  - gcc, libc...
  - libpcap
  - 'rate' currently supports only a few common interface types (loopback,
     Token Ring, Ethernet, FDDI, PPP). In case you want rate to listen
	 on an unsupported one, you'll have to specify the data link layer
	 prefix on the interface manually... well... it's quite easy to
	 google...

  rate was succefully compiled on following OS'es:
    * Linux (shaerrawedd 2.4.19-xfs #7 Fri Oct 4 18:18:38 CEST 2002 i686 unknown)
    * FreeBSD (venom 4.6.2-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE-p10 #0: Tue Mar 25
             12:59:45 CET 2003     root@venom:/usr/src/sys/compile/VENOM-3  i386)
    * OpenBSD (pantera 3.3 PANTERA#0 i386)
    * SunOS (atlantis 5.9 Generic_112233-04 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10)
  ... however it was tested only on Linux...

3. INSTALLATION

  Edit Makefile, and uncomment the right setting for your system.

  If libpcap doesn't reside in a standard place on your system, add 
  -I/include/path and -L/library path/ flags to CFLAGS and LDFLAGS.

  Type 'make' and copy 'rate' to a desired place, /usr/local/bin for instance.
  You can also copy the manual page (doc/rate.1) into a manual directory on your
  system (eg. /usr/man/man1).

4. USAGE

  Consult the manual page (doc/rate.1 and doc/rate.html).

5. OUTPUT

  pps = packets per second
  bps = bits per second
  Bps = bytes per second

  1 kpps is 1000 pps
  1 Mpps is 1000 kpps
  1 Gpps is 1000 Mpps
  1 kBps is 1024 bps
  1 MBps is 1024 kBps
  1 GBps is 1024 MBps
  1 kbps is 1024 bps
  1 Mbps is 1024 kbps
  1 Gbps is 1024 Mbps
  (of course for rate.)

6. AUTHOR

  Mateusz 'mteg' Golicz <mtg@elsat.net.pl>. Feel free to send any comments,
  patches, bugfixes, suggestions, etc. The author is not a native english
  speaker, and is aware of the fact that his english is far from perfect. Because
  of that, reports on grammar and vocabulary mistakes in this file are
  also welcome.

7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  - Matt Kimball - the author of 'mtr'
      - for the GPLd asynchronous DNS resolver code
	  
  - Luicio Jankok
      - for providing an account on a SPARC machine, so rate could have been
	    made compile on SunOS
		
  - Krzysztof Rusocki
      - for numerous suggestions and testing on FreeBSD

  - Giannis Stoilis
  - Paul Dorman
      - for a few ideas on enhancements and testing

8. LICENSE

  GNU GPL, see attached 'COPYING' file.
