Bandwidth Monitor

[dooby12]

does anyone know of any free tool/s that will monitor network traffic on a LAN, most importantly identify what is utlizing bandiwidth on the LAN.

 

[pansophic]

MRTG, Squid and etherape are a few of my favorites, but it depends a great deal on what your network looks like. Is it switched? Routed? Are your network components managed? Do you run SNMP? Can you run SNMP? Do you own the router, or is it managed by your ISP?

Other items of interest are things like are you interested in web browsing, mail, other protocols?


pansophic

 

[dooby12]

it is a switched network, we have 10 servers, about 300 users, snmp is running on our servers, we do not own the router its managed by our ip/vpn provider.

 

[pansophic]

And what type of usage are you trying to monitor? Is SNMP running on the router? If not, will the ISP give you read (public) access?


pansophic

 

[dooby12]

we are unable tyo have naytime of access to the router, well by looking at the 3com switches, there are an awful lot of collsions light, (flashing orange), users are complaining of slowness.

 

[pansophic]

Sounds like broadcast traffic. You should be able to run ethereal and get an idea who the culprit is. It is unusual, to be getting many collisions on a switch. Is the switch half or full-duplex?


pansophic

 

[newmangj]

Are you sure your 3com boxes are really switches or are they hubs? You generally will not get any collisions on a switch as each port is a point-to-point bridge segment in its own right. As such most true switches don't even include a collision light.

If it really is a switch and you are experiencing collisions the usual cause is having mismatched duplex settings between the switch port and the NIC in the workstation.

 

[dooby12]

thanks newmanj, yes they are 3com 100mb switches, we have 5 switches and 4 10mb hubs, they are all set in a star configuration. how can i check the duplex settings on switch and the clients?
i run ethereal and found a lot of traffic as ipx broadcast traffic??

 

[MattWray]

Do you have Novell on your Network? IPX is a Novell protocol. If you have none, you can remove that protocol from your Clients...

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com