[netflow-tools] Making flows expire

[Damien Miller]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Michael W. Lucas wrote:

> I'd like to have softflowd expire each flow after 300 seconds, and
> restart with a new flow.  Yes, this is rather dumb, I know, but I can
> reassemble these flows more easily than I can explain problems with
> the pictures.
> 
> One thought that comes to mind is to do a softflowctl expire-all every
> five minutes, but this strikes me as rather brute-force.  Is there a
> cleaner way to do this, or am I just stuck with using an ugly hack to
> implement my ugly requirements?

You can set the "maxlife" timeout to achieve exactly this:

> maxlife
>     This is the maximum lifetime that a flow may exist for.  All
>     flows are forcibly expired when they pass maxlife seconds.  To
>     disable this feature, specify a maxlife of 0.

so, "softflowd -tmaxlife=300 ..." should do what you want.

-d