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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2011 5:16 am 
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Anyone got any ideas on how I can monitor all traffic going out to the Internet? I'd like to see a visual of which devices use the most amount of data over a period of time.

A WHS plugin for this would be cool...

Would I need to install a proxy on my WHS box?

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2011 8:15 am 
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do you just want to monitor traffic for your WHS box or for your whole network?

If you just want it for your MHS box then have applications that you could install.

If you're wanting to watch your whole network you would have to use your WHS as a firewall or get a passive switch to monitor it then get the same applications.

I actually just use a firewall with a transparent proxy to monitor all traffic.

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2011 2:20 pm 
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Yeah I'd like to monitor traffic on the whole network. Could install a proxy on the whs server but would want it to be pretty transparent so we don't have to configure anything special on the clients which just use dhcp.

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2011 3:11 pm 
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I'm not quite sure what you're looking for is possible, at least not with most "home" components. An add-in on a WHS box would only be able to (theoretically) monitor traffic going in and out of the server. If a client on the network is sucking down a lot of Internet bandwidth but never communicating with the WHS box, you wouldn't be able to track that with WHS.

If you had a DIY server with two NICs, and the server served as the proxy to the Internet, that's a different story.

Otherwise, you would need some sort of network appliance that can monitor the traffic. Many home routers do have some basic logging capabilities that you can enable--they can tell you what IPs clients are accessing, what IPs from the Internet are trying to connect, etc. The emphasis on these is that the logging is very basic. If you're looking for something more detailed along the lines of what Wireshark can provide, you're likely going to be looking at a professional/enterprise grade firewall/proxy, which can do heavy duty packet logging, traffic analysis and more. The downside to this is that a solution like that is very, very expensive.

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 7:07 am 
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I have been using SOHO from WebSpy.com It seems to work ok but has been in ALPHA for a long time. I'm not sure if they are continuing to develop it or not. You need to install it on each client and the server. Any way here is the link if you wish to try it.

http://www.webspy.com/products/soho/default.aspx


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 4:52 am 
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Thanks for the link Yowzer....

I might end up getting a USB ethernet adapter for my server and installing something like untangle or even buying a small low powered nettop to install it on....

http://www.untangle.com/

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:19 am 
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I've used squid running on my Linux server at home as a web cache and used iptables firewall rules on the router to funnel traffic through the proxy transparently.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TransparentProxy-6.html#ss6.1
http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-293529

This works as a web proxy, but has some drawbacks and limitations. I also have my Tomato firmware router logging bandwidth usage, so it shows me totals for the month but it is an aggregated total for the WAN interface, not for individual machines on the internal network.

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 9:47 am 
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yakuza wrote:
I've used squid running on my Linux server at home as a web cache and used iptables firewall rules on the router to funnel traffic through the proxy transparently.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TransparentProxy-6.html#ss6.1
http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-293529

This works as a web proxy, but has some drawbacks and limitations. I also have my Tomato firmware router logging bandwidth usage, so it shows me totals for the month but it is an aggregated total for the WAN interface, not for individual machines on the internal network.
Good idea but I wonder if there's a way to avoid having all (web) traffic passing through the router twice...


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 12:47 pm 
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You should consider pfsence to monitior and control internet traffic.

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 6:35 pm 
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ymboc wrote:
Good idea but I wonder if there's a way to avoid having all (web) traffic passing through the router twice...


I would expect it's still faster for requests that can be cached than going out over the WAN. This is the way to do it "transparently" without having to configure a proxy on the client systems. Setting the proxy manually on each system would send requests directly to the proxy and then out through the router.

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:54 pm 
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I figured the alternative would be to hand out a different gateway address via dhcp and funnel everything through the linux server, then pass through the router and then out on the internet.... hits the router only once.

Plus you'd be able to monitor all traffic... not just web.

But if your intention is to just cache the web you probably have the best approach already since the rest of the traffic (I presume) just sails through the router without getting forwarded to the squid box.

Unfortunately both approaches introduce more single points of failure.


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 9:03 pm 
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True, though in that case why have a router and not just use the Linux box? In fact that was how I learned Linux, set up a redhat 7 box as a router for our DSL connection back before consumer routers were readily available, ran a caching-only name server on it and set it up as the gateway for the 3 PCs in my college house. 8)

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PostPosted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 9:46 am 
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yakuza wrote:
True, though in that case why have a router and not just use the Linux box?
Why for the wireless AP (which you could now firewall separately of your wired network) and for the fabulous + indispensable tomato firmware of course!


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