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Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

lorisarvendu
Grafter
Posts: 341
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎26-08-2007

Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

I'm starting to get concerned about usage now. According to PN I downloaded 1.1GB of data between 6am and 7am this morning.  Well I actually downloaded 250Mb of data that I know of.
I'm now at work and the only person at home is the wife who is about as computer literate as a box of staples, and the VMBU says I've done 737Mb of traffic since 8am this morning.
I have two Windows boxes (only one of which is on at present) and a linux box (running Mandriva).  Does anyone know of a tool I can install to monitor traffic across the whole of the network?  I need to see what's coming in an going out and from where, not just on the box I'm running it on, and if possible something that will show up local IP addresses and Mac addresses.
Note:  I did wonder if it was the PAN newsreader, so as an experiment I picked a binary newsgroup and did a 10 day header update.  It seemed to put 150Mb into the PAN cache, but certainly not 737Mb.
-Dave
A tortoise? What's that?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
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vultura
Rising Star
Posts: 325
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Registered: ‎22-05-2011

Re: Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

Dave
Some routers can do it or if the one you have supports SNMP you might be able to monitor it that way with something like - http://www.paessler.com/router_bandwidth_monitor
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prichardson
Grafter
Posts: 1,503
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Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

Hi Dave,
Regarding the Newsreader. How the cache stored?
If it's a compressed database, the storage requirements will always be significantly smaller than that transferred on the wire, as the updates are plain text and not binary, so will always be more efficiently compressed.
lorisarvendu
Grafter
Posts: 341
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎26-08-2007

Re: Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

The newsletter is stored in 300k "msg" files that have some readable text in, but mostly gibberish, so yes it probably is compressed.  I've done a test download of around the 500Mb mark, so I'll see how that appears on the VMBU in a couple of hours.
A tortoise? What's that?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
lorisarvendu
Grafter
Posts: 341
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎26-08-2007

Re: Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

Well I think I've found the reason for my large data transfers.  The PAN newsreader.  Yesterday morning at about 6:30am I refreshed headers for 1 day, then downloaded  a single 250Mb file.  The VMBU said 1.1GB.  This morning I did exactly the same.  The VMBU says 1.03GB.
Think I'd better stop using PAN.
A tortoise? What's that?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
jelv
Seasoned Hero
Posts: 26,785
Thanks: 971
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Registered: ‎10-04-2007

Re: Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ is about the best free utility for monitoring Windows PCs but won't help with Linux. (Download)
jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler)
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lorisarvendu
Grafter
Posts: 341
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎26-08-2007

Re: Can anyone recommend a traffic monitoring tool for my lan?

So far i've tried PRTG on Windows (hung every browser while starting in SSL mode), Nagios on Linux (would not start, no matter what I tried) and Zabbix on Linx (requires an SQL server and I couldn't get MySQL running correctly on my system). So I think I'll give up now.  I'm fairly certain it's the newsreader as it seems to coincide with usage.  I knew there were overheads with Usenet encoding, but I didn't realise how much.
-Dave
A tortoise? What's that?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.