NetV!sor Gatherer

This is the gatherer application of the NetV!sor suite, composed of the website, the gatherer application, and the sender application. This suite was created as part of a 3 month-long IT apprenticeship class project, where the requirement was to design and program a website that had a front-end, used PHP in the back-end, and communicated with a SQL database (ICT 120 and 151 of the 2014 curriculum). Projects were made by groups of 4 students, and no subject or theme was imposed.

About NetV!sor

This suite was made to monitor network-connected IT devices in order to spot potential network problems and / or help IT support teams debugging and preemptively spot potential problems.

About NetV!sor UI

This application has a GUI to make it easy to understand the current status of the gatherer. It shows statistics, such as the number of sender applications connected to it, the gatherer's IP address, and a box showing the latest logs. The application was fully written in C#.

Multiple gatherers may be added per NetV!sor UI instance, and multiple senders may communicate with a single gatherer.

The communication between the sender and gatherer applications uses UDP port 5252. Data sent via this port is clear-text, as there was is no real confidential information being sent. The communication is detailed in the technical specification document "netvisor_document_technique.pdf", written in French, included with released versions.

The communication between the gatherer application and the UI server is a one-way communication channel (gatherer ➡ UI) that relies on the HTTP method POST to post data received from the senders into the UI's database. An in-house solution was created to attempt to secure the communication between the gathererers and the website, although its security has never been tested (and, judging by our experience back then, it's probably not that strong).