How can I monitor my housemates' internet activity?

alexjholland

alexjholland

alexjholland

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Joined
8 Oct 2006
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322
I live in a shared house at university with seven other guys, and people leaving their PCs running torrenting programs is killing our connection.

Our house has hardwired internet, laid out in the following fashion:

- We have a belkin router in the hallway with 4 outputs.

- 3 of them go straight to the first 3 bedrooms

- Output 4 runs into a big hub, which splits the signals to the other bedrooms/living room.

At the moment you have to go to the hallway and start unplugging cables to see which one makes the internet speed up. People start getting irate and denying it's them, even when it is.

- What software solutions are available?

- How can I monitor incoming and outgoing traffic? Being able to pin it down to individual pcs would be awesome, but even if it only does the whole house, at least I could prove someone, somewhere was doing it.
 
Depending on the router you can enable SNMP and install an SNMP "trapper" like PRTG to monitor usage.
Alternatively you can install one of many service based traffic monitors on each PC if the owners will let you. The best ones will be ones which have a web interface so you can HTTP in from your PC to view the gathered info.

For the more adept net snoop there's software out there that can use ARP poisoning to intercept traffic which will allow you to see and possibly log what they're up to.
 
Is it possible to look at the router logs and check via that.

I know I used to do that when my housemate used to deny he was running torrents.
 
Ok:

- I am NOT forking out for another router.
- I can't block them out, they know I know enough about computers to get them back - and one of them is a similar level to me.

I just want some software or guidance on using DOS/Windows to monitor the activity on the router. I have full access inside the router and their IP addresses, surely being able to monitor the network activity must be possible?

- Can I flash this router with tomato?

Thanks
 
Unless you install it on their machines, it's very unlikely the router will have any capacity for telling you what they're doing.

Impossible to tell if Tomato would run on it without knowing the model number, but it's unlikely.
 
No. It would tell you what ports they had open, which is about as useful to you as the weather in the South Pole.
 
Well thanks for giving me some solid answers at least. Let me know if you think of anything.

For now running broadbandspeedtest.co.uk and watching to see which cable being pulled out makes my speed jump from 32kbs up to 1100kbs will have to suffice. At least the cables have our room numbers on :)
 
The simple answer is - if you want to do what you're asking you *WILL* have to fork out for the new router. They're very cheap - ~£30 from an auction site.

Alternatively, you could block ingoing and outgoing on a huge range of ports (assuming your router supports it). Just leave 80 and 445 open. I'm sure they'll notice though, or find a workaround.
 
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