OT. FOAK Network Traffic Monitor/Meter

Hi,

Situation we have is a small home network, One (main) desktop PC
ethernet wired to ADSL modem, one desktop and two or three laptops
wirelessly connected using same ADSL connection, all running through a
BT Voyager 2100. One laptop runs W98SE the rest run XP Home. We won't
be changing OS'

We know what the total traffic stats are for the ADSL connection 'cos
they're held in a log of the Voyager management software, but I'd like a
small program to monitor what each separate computer is doing, if
possible.

Must br free of charge as it's probably going on all computers but it's
only needed to 'check' who's doing what and is unlikely to be left for
longer than a week or two, unless it proves too useful to lose. At
present we only have a 1meg connection and when we're all on, or if the
kids leave something downloading it slows dramatically, so I want to see
who amongst us is the worst bandwidth hog. Not bothered about being
sneaky, in fact I'd like the kids to 'know' we're starting to watch what
they're doing ... So it would be nice, also, to have a visual
confirmation of traffic flow, maybe similar to the traffic meter bars on
Zone Alarm. We've just removed ZA as it now seems to be causing
problems, but the Traffic Meter part of it was very handy.

Be nice if someone could give us a nudge in the right direction.

Cheers

 

Dunno owt about how you'd go about monitoring who's using what, bar that
network activity is graphed in the task manager, so presumably logging can
be switched on. Get the grebchildren using utorrent and limit both download
and upload speeds - a seeding torrent with a lot of upload activity can
pretty much paralyse your connection despite there being available download
bandwidth - and remember that ADSL is assymetrical, so you'll have 1megabit
of download and probably only 128 or 256k of upload (divide by 8 to get
theoretical maximum kbytes/second).

 

Analog-X Netstat Live is free, but
this one...
http://bwmonitor.com/
is very good at showing what's going on and is free for 30 days anyway.

 

Try www.ntop.org

I don't know what the windows package is like, but the linux one works well,
is stable and doesn't eat memory.

 

Yes, we're on 128 atm. Going to switch to an 8m / 384 connection in a
couple of months, when this contract runs out so some of the issue
(hopefully) will go away.

 

Cheers for that, we'll have a look at both.

 

snip

Netmeter
http://readerror.gmxhome.de/

Does what is sez on the box.

hth

 

I thought about trying this

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/link/tbm/

but ended up, on Pip's recommendation IIRC, using this

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm

as I like the instant speed readings.

 

*ding* works well, works on all systems we have and can be left to run
with stats being read later, most excellent, thanks.

Very much.

 

GC also suggested this and I've tried it. Whilst it's pretty good we've
gone for netmeter as it does that little bit more that's useful for us.

Thanks anyway.

 

Pleasure.