Chris Wilson wrote:
== snip ==
> Predictably, perhaps, these networks tend to suffer from worms and from
> users downloading music and other large files, clogging their bandwidth.
> The network admins usually have no clue what is wrong, or even that
> something is wrong, and instead blame their ISP.
>
> They need to know how to solve these problems as quickly as possible,
> with minimal training and minimal skills to learn. I would call this
> "network admin for dummies".
>
> They need to be able to use a friendly, simple GUI tool to identify
> heavy traffic on their network, track down the IP address responsible
> (and preferably the computer name or the logged-in user name) and lart
> the luser of that box, or patch it up, as appropriate.
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_management]
>
> For this simple task, I think that a standard network analyser/packet
> sniffer like Ethereal, with its scrolling packet window, is too
> powerful, too confusing, and presents too much information to the
> inexperienced user. (Please don't take this as a criticism - I have by
> no means dismissed Ethereal - see below).
Wouldn't something like etherape http://etherape.sourceforge.net/ give
you most of what you are after?
On the not unreasonable assumption that most users would be running
Windoze, nmblookup from Samba will tell you who is logged on once you
have the IP address.
All of these assume you are running your monitoring tool at a place
which can see all the relevent traffic. Otherwise you are looking at a
requirement of smart switches on which you can use SNMP to get the port
level statistics. Then you'll want a tool like OpenNMS, Netview or
OpenView. All of which have some fairly formidible hardware requirements.
--
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
-- Dr. Who
