I am after an open source tool to monitor the network traffic of a small lan. I thought of wireshark but the amount of details it captures is massive. What I need is just a basic analysis of the network traffic by protocol, host, etc. I am going to run this in an old box with windows xp.
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4 Answers
Try NTop, it is simple, open source and multiplatform.
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I was quite interest when I read this, at least until I went to the web site. It might nominally be multiplatform but the only Windows binary is a severely crippled "demo" version. Not everyone is in a position to recompile on Windows and it would be quite a cumbersome job to recompile with any version of Visual C/C++, although there are instructions for compiling with MinGW (if anyone still uses that). In short, if you're not a programmer forget about the Windows version unless you want to buy it. Aug 12, 2010 at 10:46
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Sorry, I used ntop only on a linux machine and I didn't read with attention the download section of ntop site.– lg.Aug 12, 2010 at 11:47
you still want Wireshark, and a bundle of filters to hide everything you're not interested in.
Capture filter will not capture the stuff you don't want, keeping log sizes down; Display filters will let you view the captured data easier and still drill-down into it, if (when) necessary.
There are tutorials, and I found the Wireshark docs to be very good.
Try TCPMon . This is a small java utility and shows few netweok activity bettwen the host and server.
This works fine on Windows Machine . You may try and see on Linux or Mac .
Wireshark, ntop, iptraf and such like are useful for investigating problems but not suitable for monitoring your network. You might want to have a google for MRTG, PasTMon, Nagios, Cacti, Scrutinizer, Argus
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