If I have an Ubuntu server

[todpod]

can i use it to monitor Internet traffic on a net and/or what software would i need to do that. Thank you

 

[Red Squirrel]

You could check out Pandora or Nagios. there are others too. We use Pandora at work, and it's ok. I hear Nagios is very good too, but I have not tried it out yet, been wanting to set it up at home.

http://pandorafms.org/
http://www.nagios.org/

 

[Nothinman]

can i use it to monitor Internet traffic on a net and/or what software would i need to do that. Thank you

"Monitor Internet traffic" is a pretty vague requirement, what do you actually want to monitor? Bandwidth usage, which sites people are browsing, bandwidth per-user, etc?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Guessing he meant services, for actual "traffic" there's always tcpdump, but you'd need some kind of rotation setup or you'll run out of disk space fast.

 

[Nothinman]

Guessing he meant services, for actual "traffic" there's always tcpdump, but you'd need some kind of rotation setup or you'll run out of disk space fast.

Tcpdump is just a diagnostic tool, you wouldn't want to use that for monitoring anything. If you want DPI then you'd want to setup an IPS or IDS like Snort but I doubt that's what he wanted.

 

[todpod]

I just want to keep a eye on what everyone is doing. This is for a bunch of former foster child and probation kids who will be out on there own for there first time

 

[Nothinman]

I just want to keep a eye on what everyone is doing. This is for a bunch of former foster child and probation kids who will be out on there own for there first time

If you want to reliably track their browsing then you should probably setup a proxy like squid and force their browsing through it. Then you can run one of the squid log analyzers.

 

[Khyron320]

Download clearOS aka clarkconnect and set it up as your router it has everything you need. Forget customizing a district, use what is out there

 

[chuck2002]

Ya You could also use IPCOP or pfsense firewalls for this. You could setup squid as a transparent proxy, so there wouldn't need to be any proxy configuration that needed to be done on any of your computers. A side benefit here is that it will work as a web cache and speed up web surfing.
Another benefit is that you can not only view the content that your users are seeing, but you can control it by user, device, browser, time of day, web site, etc.

 

[JMahon]

You could check out Pandora or Nagios. there are others too. We use Pandora at work, and it's ok. I hear Nagios is very good too, but I have not tried it out yet, been wanting to set it up at home.

http://pandorafms.org/
http://www.nagios.org/

Nagios is pretty good, we use it at work for a network of about 300 +/- servers and 400 +/- workstations.