[IPFIX] announcement: ipfix for python 3

[Brian Trammell <[e-mail]>]

Greetings, all,

Those of you who need to read or write IPFIX messages from programs written in Python 3 can now do so by installing the 'ipfix' package from the Python Package Index (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipfix; pip install ipfix or easy_install ipfix should work too, depending on how your Python environment is set up).

The module provides a bridge between Messages and streams of Messages, and Python dicts and tuples. It supports Templates and Options Templates, with built-in support for IANA and RFC5103 IEs, as well as the definition of enterprise-specific IEs in IEspec format (section 10 of draft-ietf-ipfix-ie-doctors).

The module is not a complete implementation of an Exporting and/or Collecting Process, though the ipfix.reader.MessageStreamReader and ipfix.writer.MessageStreamWriter objects can be fairly easily bound to TCP sockets and/or used with the socketserver framework. SCTP support is forthcoming. It should be fairly easy to implement UDP support as well, though it's a low priority.

Documentation is at britram.github.io/python-ipfix. Be advised that the module is alpha quality: there's some lightweight testing based on doctest, but testing hasn't been at all rigorous to date. The module is under active development but the API should remain reasonably stable. Bug reports are welcome. I'm using it in some light day-to-day analysis tasks and it seems to work reasonably well with the data I have; your mileage may vary.

Enjoy,

Brian