how are you sharing the network connection?
do you use proxy? or direct router?
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find out who is downloading files
I maintain a Windows network, with about 6 Windows 2003 Servers and 45 workstations (all running Windows XP Pro or Vista Business).
Occasionally our Internet connection gets bogged down.
Is there a program (shareware utility?) I can run from my computer that will (a) scan the network and (b) tell me who is hogging all the bandwidth? Maybe Joe on the second floor is streaming a video or Carol in the shipping department is downloading music.
Thanks
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Answers
Hi,
Simply deploy a Proxy server in your network Infrastructure. Make it a transparent proxy which means that your Internet connection will terminate on the proxy server and then on your network;
Internet ------------->Proxy Server -----------------> Switch
The proxy server will have two NIC's. One on which Internet connection would be terminated and the other which would connect to your Internal Network.
Popular proxy servers are;
1- MS ISA Server www.microsoft.com
2- Squid Cache Server www.squid-cache.org
I personally recommend using squid due to its powerful features of bandwidth management. It is free and open source.
Another Interesting option to consider is Untangle;
www.untangle.com
Quick'n'dirty:
1. Plug a hub between your firewall and the LAN switch
2. Plug your notebook (or any windows xp pc with good performance) to that hub
3. Download Wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org/
4. Start capturing (default options should be fine, just choose the right ethernet adapter in promiscous mode)
5. After capturing for a while, stop the capture and look into menue "Statistics" (i.e. "conversations", "endpoints", etc)
Possible optimizations:
If you have enough space on the pc, you can make "per minute" files, where you can afterwards (after a congestion or the like) analyze only the file from the specific time the issue happened.
If your LAN switch supports mirroring, plug the pc - or better its second NIC - to that mirroring-port (you need just to mirror the port where the firewall is attached to) and listen on that NIC.
This solution is not so fancy and colorful - but should give you what you need ;-)
P2P, online streaming or downloading can easily consume most of your bandwidth.
I recommend you to use "WFilter Enterprise", which enables you to monitor all internet activities and bandwidth on a mirroring port of your switch.
You may check out this guide for more details:
http://blog.imfirewall.us/
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by: skiddy89Posted on 2009-01-07 at 17:18:31ID: 23321348
I checked with Joe - he wasn't.
The problem you have is that you need to monitor traffic in order to see who's using it, so you need to monitor the bottleneck - which most likely will be your router or firewall.
Most firewalls have an option on their GUI to monitor connections - this generally shows you the source IP, destination IP and amount of data transferred.
That's what I used to clamp down on streaming Christmas music as early as December the 5th!