network traffic monitoring program - linux

[Jaybird]

I am looking for a network traffic monitor. last month my apartment hit our data cap. knowing what ive used there should have been no way that 3 people hit this cap. so in short, I am looking for a program that will let me see who is doing what with the internet and if its potentially illegal. ive tried searching the ol' google but came up with nothing. my server is linux based which is up 24/7 so that is why I am looking for a linux program. thanks, for the help. 

[Cheesebaron]

Basically you will either need to do:

 

1. Dump the traffic on the LAN

2. Route all traffic through a server

 

But what you are doing might be against the law, unless you inform and get consent from all your flat mates.

 

Doing 2, will be easier to monitor the data flow and count the traffic, and based on the MAC addresses or local IP addresses you can determine who is doing what. Either way you will need to go through the headers of the packets going through your network. There are loads of Linux distributions that do firewalling and will be able to log IP headers with some simple rules.

 

pfSense and m0n0wall among others are pretty nice. Not Linux, but BSD, but should be very familiar if you know your way around Linux.

[Jaybird]

Basically you will either need to do:

 

1. Dump the traffic on the LAN

2. Route all traffic through a server

 

But what you are doing might be against the law, unless you inform and get consent from all your flat mates.

 

Doing 2, will be easier to monitor the data flow and count the traffic, and based on the MAC addresses or local IP addresses you can determine who is doing what. Either way you will need to go through the headers of the packets going through your network. There are loads of Linux distributions that do firewalling and will be able to log IP headers with some simple rules.

 

pfSense and m0n0wall among others are pretty nice. Not Linux, but BSD, but should be very familiar if you know your way around Linux.

Thanks for the help! I found related videos

 

 

considering I pay the bill and its my apartment I think they are under my jurisdiction. 

[Cheesebaron]

If I were you, I would check out the rules. I know here in Europe it is against human rights to be surveilled like that without consent. That is why most ISPs recently disabled and deleted their header logging.

Just make sure you are on the right side of the law, in case someone takes legal action.

[Jaybird]

After further research I've found a program called bandwidthd that suites my needs. While it doesn't show what users are doing it does show bandwidth usage per ip.