A friend asked me about the availability of software that will be able to tell how much bandwidth is being tied up by his roommates. I’m assuming he’s using a router, which may complicate things, or maybe make them less complicated, I’m not sure. His email explains what he wants in more concrete detail:
“Heya…I was wondering. Have you heard of any kind of program that
can monitor my network for activity? What I really want is to be able
to tell when some computer is downloading a lot of content or just
taking up a bunch of bandwidth. For instance, if someone is on some
filesharing program and I am noticing some lag issues maybe in a game
or something, it would be nice to know why there is lag so I can
possibly tell him, hey get off that Limeware.”
Being on a router really limits the possibilities for network sniffing - if he’s using a hub or something, I’d bet Ethereal would be of some use, but a router typically uses switching technology, so your friend’s PC won’t know about any traffic not addressed to it.
I use ntop for long-term statistics on the Linux box that does my routing - if I had problems like this I think it may help.
I think the best option would be to either check the router lights for activity, or log on to the router and see if it has any per-PC statistic reporting capability.
Not that this post will really help you, but I know that back when I was living in a fraternity (just a year ago) we frequebntly had network problems, and a couple of guys would use a sniffer to determine who was hogging bandwidth, and we did have a router. I’m not sure how they did it or what program was used, but it was probably on the computer that functioned as the router, now that I think about it.
This capability allows the user to control the bandwidth allocation in various ways, either by service (ports), MAC address, or lan port on the router.
Ethereal works pretty good, and the price is good too (it’s free).
If you have a router, you have to set up a mirror port on the router so that it will echo all traffic to that port, and the computer running ethereal (or whatever analyzer you like) has to be connected to the mirror port. Without the mirror port, the router will route packets only to the ports that they go to (that’s why they call it a router) so your monitor would miss all of the traffic that is on the other computers.