Best app for monitoring bandwidth for each individual computer?

[NathanBWF]

Situation: So I just spent the last 3 hours trouble shooting why our internet connection was so damn slow (i.e. About 15 times slower than usual). Long story short, turns out that someone on the network was downloading a bunch of music via Bit Torrent thus choking the sh1t out of our bandwidth.

Any apps out there that can tell you how much bandwidth a computer on the network is using...? Only way I caught the guy is that I happend to be walking by and noticed he was on a bit torrent site. We don't have a client/server network setup so we can't really stop people from installing these apps on their computers, but at the same time I don't want this ever to happen again.

Suggestions?

TIA.

 

[RedCOMET]

How many users on the network?

If you have a spare box lying around, you might want to install a linux distro on it that supports traffic shaping and monitoring for your network.

I'm not sure if Smoothwall, or mOnOwall are the most ideal solutions, but they are free and are easy to configure.

 

[NathanBWF]

Originally posted by: RedCOMET
How many users on the network?

If you have a spare box lying around, you might want to install a linux distro on it that supports traffic shaping and monitoring for your network.

I'm not sure if Smoothwall, or mOnOwall are the most ideal solutions, but they are free and are easy to configure.

We have probably around 46 computers on the network here, we also have a VPN to another city with another 10 or so computers there.

I'm not familiar with traffic shaping and monitor in Linux, but I do have a spare box around so I could give it a shot. I'll also check out those other 2 aswell.

 

[netsysadmin]

How are your computers accessing the internet? Are you using a router? If so what brand?

John

 

[NathanBWF]

Originally posted by: netsysadmin
How are your computers accessing the internet? Are you using a router? If so what brand?

John

Pretty much all 46 of them.

DSL Modem --> Cisco 506 PIX Firewall --> Hubs + Switches --> LAN

 

[nweaver]

if your switches support snmp, you could use mrtg. I think that if you install an snmp agent on each machine, you can also monitor the b/w of the NIC on each machine w/mrtg.

 

[kt]

Is your switch a managed switch? It may support port mirroring.. in that case, just mirror the port that the PIX firewall is connected to. Then use a packet sniffer to capture all traffic coming in and out of that port. Ethereal is a freeware packet sniffer that you can use.

 

[Brazen]

Does the PIX not have bandwidth monitoring?

 

[spidey07]

buy a packetshaper.

Packeteer makes them and they are incredible.

 

[cmetz]

NathanBWF, not exactly what you were looking for, but I have found that 'show xlate' on the PIX is a great tool for getting a feel for who the heavy users are. More often than not, your virus/P2P culprit has a ton of active flow entries, compared to a few for everyone else, so they stick out. It at least gives you a good idea of whose traffic you should go sniff.

 

[Night201]

Repremand him/her and block your ports.