Monitoring Internet Usage

There is absolutely no better way to monitor Internet usage, or ANY network usage than to run a sniffer on your LAN. I have told my children that I have the ability to see absolutely everything that they do in regards to Internet usage, and that I will occasionally do this in the course of my work while I am learning all these tools and practicing for all these customers that I am going to have some day. They understand this, and are somewhat restrained in their Internet behaviors, as children should be. I prefer this to sneaking some key capture software on their PC, or running some lame "net nanny," which probably can't keep up with rogue sites in any case. I can also see exactly when they are on the PC, so I can detect late night trysts also. And best of all, it is free!

I use ethereal, and I make sure I have a hub instead of a switch on my network. It is a simple matter of entering a filter of "host kid's PC" to capture all traffic related to that PC. I actually have a more complicated filter line to filter out all the local extraneous pings and netbios junk. You will need to download and read some of the manual in order to learn some of the capture tricks. But a simple "host 192.168.1.100" e.g. will capture only packets involving the PC 192.168.1.100.

See this page on troubleshooting for some more info. See this page for some "idiot" instructions on setting up sniffing.

See the reference on the bottom of this page for setting up your ethernet switch for monitoring purposes - you must mirror all the ports into the one you will be monitoring on.

TCP/IP STUFF

WIRELESS STUFF

PC STUFF

ADSL/CABLE MODEM STUFF