Can I tell if my bandwidth is being used?

Factual Questions
1

I use an Apple Airport wireless network in my home. There is a password; so unless someone is psychic or a good guesser, no one is stealing my bandwidth. But if I didn’t have password protection, would I be able to tell if my bandwidth was being used by someone else (and could I see any identifying information)?

Or even with the password, is there someplace I could look on my system (OS X) to see who is logged on (including me)? (I normally use my PowerBook. There’s also an old iMac G3 in the house, and my former roommate used his PC laptop on the system.)

2

iEyeNet

3

It appears I have that in my widgets. It just says ‘discovering your router’.

Is there a non-widget utility in the OS that shows who’s on?

4

I don’t know about your particular router, but on mine (a 2wire model) if you go into the configuration utility of the router (by just typing the ip number of the router into any browser, regardless of the OS of the system you’re on – I’ve even done it on a PSP), you can see exactly who’s logged on at the moment, and who’s been logged on recently but isn’t currently logged on.

How useful it is would be another matter. Basically it’ll just let you know someone else’s been on your connection, in which case you should change your security settings, passwords, make sure you use WPA encryption, etc. You probably won’t be able to figure out something like “Bob Jenkins next door is stealing my bandwidth” unless you know Bob’s MAC addresses (and he’s not spoofing them).

5

I know I wouldn’t be able to tell that ‘Bob Jenkins is stealing my bandwidth’. I’d just like to know if ‘someone’ was. (Note: I have no reason to believe that anyone is or has; I’m just curious.)

I’m not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. Do you mean I should open Airport Admin Utility and read the IP address, and then type that IP address into a browser (Safari, in my case)? I tried that and got this error: Safari can’t open the page “http://xx.x.x.x/” because it could not connect to the server “xx.x.x.x”.

6

Replace the xx.x.x.x with the IP of your router

7

Whoosh? :dubious:

If not, I did use the actual IP of the router. I know that the actual number is useless to anyone, but ‘Need To Know’ and all that.

8

If your airport is like most wirless routers it should have given you a prompt for username and password but I’m clueless when it comes to apple products

9

AirPort products do not have web interfaces. For the widget to work, SNMP needs to be turned on with AirPort Utility.

10

Probably best not to mess with it then.

11

That is what I meant, but I had no idea if it would work for Apple stuff or not. Sorry to hear it doesn’t.

The correct number would’ve been in the range internal to your network anyway. Something like 192.168.1.254 or 192.168.0.1. Beyond useless to anyone not in your network, and anyone in your network would already know it anyway.