Monitoring network traffic on my LAN?

Question

There are a group of connecting to the internet via the same wireless router. I own the connection and have access to the router.

I suspect that somebody is downloading a lot, which is slowing the connection down, is there any program I can use to monitor how much traffic is coming from each computer connected to the router?

thanks

Answer 1

Assuming you have a switch, and that it is a real switch rather than most home switches, you can set up a capture port - sometimes called a monnitor port or span port - and put a PC on that running a piece of software called Wireshark.



That will capture all the traffic going through the switch and you can look and see who is downloading most.



You may be able to do soemthing with the router, but that will depend on the router. I used to use a Draytek, which was very good for looking at what was hapenning. My current Thompson (bebox) is less good. If you tell us the router, we may be able to help.

Answer 2

Hi,

I recommend sax2, its real-time display and statistical traffic analysis of whole network; you may find network resource abuse, worms, denial of service attacks, to lead the network work well. visit http://www.ids-sax2.com/articles/MonitorNetworkTraffic.htm and download sax2 to help you.

Answer 3

im not sure how you can do it (so i guess im not really helping at all) but my father in law had the same problem, and he somehow went in and blocked other people from connecting, and i think you can monitor the bandwidth..again..ive seen it done, but im not so sure..