Software to monitor wire and wirless lan activity?

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Koslov

[H]ard|Gawd
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Can someone recommend me a good software to monitor wired and wireless traffic (bandwidth use) on my network? I use a Linksys WRT160Nv3 router.

I share my internet with 3 friends in my apartment and I'd like to know who is using all the bandwidth. I have unlimited DL/UL but I need a good ping for certain games and when people download I can get > 450ms which is unacceptable ( I should be around 12ms).
 
you won't be able to monitor the wired traffic without putting a hub before the router, and having the wired computers connected to the hub, which then connects to the router.
Then you would also need a wireless connection connection to "sniff" the wireless traffic.

wireshark could do it, but it might prove difficult to get the filtering done properly.
 
Look to see if you can install DDWRT on your router. If you can run that, you should be able to access all the information in realtime.
 
As noted above, putting a custom firmware on the router itself - since all data is passing through it - is the solution. There's no absolute guarantee that your specific router, the Linksys WRT160Nv3, has such a firmware available. But, as luck would have it and a quick Google search confirms, there is:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT150N_&_WRT160N

I wouldn't go just off that page immediately, however. I would still do some research with the DD-WRT wiki and forums to see how other people have managed once they did the firmware installation and see what their opinions and experiences are like before making the attempt yourself.

DD-WRT basically turns that router into a whole new device, with capabilities - like bandwidth monitoring and reports - the original factory firmware couldn't even dream of.
 
Demon10000 said:
Look to see if you can install DDWRT on your router. If you can run that, you should be able to access all the information in realtime.
Click to expand...

Just did today. Fantastic firmware, awesome.
Does what I needed. Thank you!
 
Abit off-topic, but why this is happening? Because I can download probably anything at any amount at home and other computers will be still with same ping and speed as well, in fact no monitoring needed, and I have. Brother is downloading loads of stuff and I didn't even notice that when I played games or was downloading something as well.(I have 4yr old netgear router).
 
lots of downloads/upload can saturate the line and cause latency to spike.

think of it as a traffic jam on the highway.
too many cars trying to fit into too small of a road. That one car can't pass the rest of the traffic.

happens to me all the time. If I let my newsgroup reader download at 100%, web browsing slows to worse than a crawl.
 
Sounds like you need QOS more than monitoring. And if I'm not mistaken, DD-WRT only monitors bandwidth as a whole and not for individual ports. At least that's the way it works on my WRT-54G with a micro build.

One thing you can do with DD-WRT is create virtual network interfaces that you can then limit the amount of bandwidth to anything connected to that interface. I created a public WLAN that was limited to 128k/16k.
 
Acer_Sheep said:
Abit off-topic, but why this is happening? Because I can download probably anything at any amount at home and other computers will be still with same ping and speed as well, in fact no monitoring needed, and I have. Brother is downloading loads of stuff and I didn't even notice that when I played games or was downloading something as well.(I have 4yr old netgear router).
Click to expand...

If your connection is fast enough that your brother's downloading is not saturating your connection, and your router can handle the traffic, you will not see much higher pings, or have problems surfing the web or playing games.
 
What kind of OS do you use? Try NetworkShield firewall, it's good network monitoring software.
 
You can try IP-guard. It has many features. One is bandwidth management which can help you limit the traffic use. Hope this information can help because I'm using it in my company right now. It's pretty good.
 
Acer_Sheep said:
Abit off-topic, but why this is happening? Because I can download probably anything at any amount at home and other computers will be still with same ping and speed as well, in fact no monitoring needed, and I have. Brother is downloading loads of stuff and I didn't even notice that when I played games or was downloading something as well.(I have 4yr old netgear router).
Click to expand...

Because some routers have QoS (Quality of Service)...others don't. And if you compare different routers...even compare those that have QoS...some of them do QoS better than others. Also can depend on how well the QoS settings were setup and adjusted.

Also can depend on if the router is the only router on the network...or if the person added their router behind the ISP supplied gateway which is really a combo modem/router..and end up with a yucky double NAT situation.

Also can depend on the ISP connection itself...some types of connections are more tolerable of heavier traffic than others.

Also can depend on the model of router ...how much RAM it has, and how many concurrent sessions it can handle. As downloading, especially peer to peer/torrent traffic, can absolutely crush the typical home grade router...especially older ones.

But now the thread is changing topics and more appropriate for the "networking" and security forum.
 
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