That turnkey capability will continue to be refined and expanded in the increment revision process for the CoralReef software suite. In addition, the CoralReef analysis tools provide a solid starting place for developers seeking to develop custom monitoring solutions. The top level of the CoralReef analysis suite provides report generation capabilities for the World Wide Web. With the World Wide Web rapidly becoming the communication medium of choice, these report generation capabilities allow traffic analysis results to be shared with groups as small as local network administrators or as large as end users. Description of CoralReef drivers The CoralReef monitor drivers are patches to the operating system that permit the passive collection of data.
Installation requires a basic familiarity with configuring a FreeBSD kernel.
In addition to collecting data from the network monitor boards noted above, the CoralReef software suite can use data from other monitoring systems or previously collected data. This data can be used in the same way by any application using the libcoral library or CRL.pm Perl module. Description of the CoralReef libcoral C library Libcoral provides a C API for reading OCXmon devices and several different trace file formats, and for writing trace files. A device source has one interface. But a trace file may have been created by monitoring multiple devices, so it may contain multiple interfaces.