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>Background Operation</A
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><P
>  IPTraf's facilities can be placed in the background solely for
  logging. When running in the background, it doesn't display any output
  on the screen, and doesn't receive input
  from the keyboard, and drops you back to the shell.</P
><P
>  Before starting a statistical facility in the background, configure
  IPTraf in the usual way (set filters, add TCP/UDP ports, etc).</P
><P
>  Once that's done, exit all instances of IPTraf on the system, then
  invoke IPTraf from the command line with the parameter
  to start the facility you want, the timeout (<TT
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-t</TT
>) parameter
  if you wish, and the <TT
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-B</TT
> parameter to actually daemonize the program.
   For example, to run the IP traffic monitor in the
  background for all interfaces, issue the command</P
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><PRE
CLASS="SYNOPSIS"
>iptraf -i all -B</PRE
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><P
>  To run the detailed interface statistics
on interface <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>eth0</TT
> for 5 minutes
  in the background:</P
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><PRE
CLASS="SYNOPSIS"
>iptraf -d eth0 -t 5 -B</PRE
></TD
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><P
>  If the timeout parameter is not specified, the facility
  will run until the process receives a USR2 signal. To stop a facility in
  the background, do a</P
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><PRE
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>ps x</PRE
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><P
>  at the command line, and find the process id (pid) of the iptraf process
  you're looking for. Then send that process a USR2 signal with the kill
  command:</P
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>kill -USR2 pid</PRE
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><P
>  Since IPTraf cannot send error messages to the terminal, all
  messages are written to the file daemon.log in the
  IPTraf logging directory.</P
><P
>  The <TT
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-B</TT
> parameter automatically enables logging regardless of its configured
  setting. The parameter is ignored if not used with one of the parameters
  to start a facility from the command line.</P
><P
>  The log file can be specified with the <TT
CLASS="COMPUTEROUTPUT"
>-L</TT
> command-line parameter. If
  this parameter is not specified, the default log file name for the
  facility will be used (see the descriptions of the
  facilities above for the default log name patterns).
  If you don't specify an path, the log file will be placed in
  <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>/var/log/iptraf</TT
>.</P
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