Mac newtork monitoring utility

[lnp]

Hey OSCRites. I was wondering if anyone could suggest a network monitoring utility. Basically, I've found that whenever one of my roommates is on our wireless network, our bandwidth speed drops to next to nothing. Well...not nothing but from 1000 kb/s to maybe half that. However, I want to prove this and I'm wondering if there is a utility that I can use with my Airport Extreme to see how much bandwidth each roommate is drawing. My airport is MAC address filtered, so it'd be awesome if it'd say how much traffic is going to each address.

[dcv]

Hmm, there's a bunch of really good Linux tools for this sort of thing - and the Fink project has ported a few of them - http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/section.php/net - ntop and ethereal are your best bets (though, for the record, I've never used ethereal on OS X, and I've never used ntop at all, but it looks good - http://www.ntop.org/).

EDIT: ntop looks like the simplest tool for the job, and can be gotten without Fink here - http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=17233

[dparm]

I suppose you could try some sort of packet sniffer like Ethereal to at least see what kind of traffic it is; picking out things like BitTorrent or Limewire are relatively easy.


This is the tool you really want though (PC only):

http://www.tucows.com/preview/228151

It shows bandwidth usage for each machine on a given switch/router. We used this at my summer internship to figure out there was a rogue machine on our network that was spamming.

[lnp]

How easy is it to use Linux applications on a mac though? I've never done that.

[dcv]

It's not overtly difficult, but there is some terminal stuff involved. This looks like a pretty good how-to for ntop in particular - http://homepage.mac.com/duling/halfdozen/ntop-Howto.html - it uses DarwinPorts, which is similar to Fink (these two projects basically take Linux apps and recompile them to run on OS X, and you can install them via the terminal). If you follow it to the letter, you should be fine. Definitely read up on ntop's documentation, though, to actually make it do what you need it to do.

//if there were a native OS X app for network monitoring, this would be much easier

//anybody know of any?

[lnp]

if there were a native OS X app for network monitoring, this would be much easier

Aye. That's kind of what I'm looking for. I mean, I can have him turn off his computer, powercycle the cable modem and then show him that our network runs faster, but pointing to his MAC or IP address and saying "DUDE! You're hoggin' our stuff!" would be more convincing. But if I have to run terminal, I can. It'd be awesome to not have to. Maybe Trees, Mark, or Chris K. have some suggestions.

[nlopez]

Kismac might let you capture the traffic it's monitoring and maybe even break it down for you. If not, ethereal can take the data dump from Kismac and let you sort it to say "See, here's 10 times as much Kazaa/bittorrent/virus traffic coming from your computer as from the rest of us combined, knock it off!"

[lnp]

My only concern is that Kismac seems to really invade the network traffic and I don't want to alienate my roommates by making them feel like I'm spying on their traffic content. Rather I just want to say that fair share is fair share and he's the type of dude who needs evidence. But barring another alternative, I can try Nick's suggestion.

[nlopez]

My feeling on that is that if you're going to microwave my brain with your traffic, I'm gonna take a look at what's keeping me warm from time to time, for giggles and grins. Driftnet is fun for that. Or EtherPEG for Mac (http://www.etherpeg.org/)

[dparm]

Lars, this whole thing is a slippery slope. If you've given him the opportunity to fess up to hogging all the bandwidth, and he declined to man up and confess, then I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.

[lnp]

Well the good news is that I only have to live with this dude until June 3 when I move into my own apartment/production studio/wireless network.

Thanks for your responses. There aren't any computing people here that I know, so y'all are my outlet for all things tech.

[dcv]

Heh, I forgot about KisMAC (and I use the program somewhat regularly, too). Launch it and keep an eye on your network - if the packet count is soaring into the thousands, then your roommate's mooching a bit too much.

If you're using an Airport Extreme card, you want to get Revision 75 (R75) - http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=153918 - it has a passive driver for the Airport Extreme. Passive scanning isn't tracable and doesn't add to the network traffic, so if your roommate isn't being nefarious, at least he'll never know you tried. Plus, when you pull up the client list in KisMAC, it only has number of bytes sent and received (nothing about what kind of bytes are being sent), and that's all you'll need to show that he's driving extra traffic. It's not really spying. You really have nothing to feel bad about unless you launched ethereal and found out he's downloading gigs of pr0n off of bittorrent while on AIM ;)

[Unregistered]

I use ProteMac Meter ...may be it help anyone...