On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Nathan England <nathan@paysonlinux.org> wrote:

Hello Hello,

I'm looking for a program or something that can monitor my network as a whole and tell me which machines are consuming all my bandwidth. Something that I could install on a linux box, plug it into the network and stick it in a corner and check it a week later would be ideal. All the tools I've tried only tell me what the machine itself is consuming, not other things on the network. Any recommendations out there?

For internet link bandwidth reporting, I'd take a look at ntop. You may need to enable a mirror port on your switch to "see" this traffic to and from the internet.

For an internal network bandwidth, I'd suggest using an SNMP capable switch and a problem like cacti or MRTG graphing bandwidth on each switch port. NTOP can help with internal bandwidth reporting, but the mirror port setup is more complicated in a single switch internal network.

Hope this helps,

Tony Wasson