6 replies to this topic

[ged25]

I'm planning to write an application that monitors networks. But I'm not very clear as to what are all the things that such an application would do and how to go about it. I've tried searching Google but no luck. Help would be very much appreciated.

[WingedPanther]

You probably need to start with a clearer statement of what you're attempting to monitor. Are you trying to monitor TCP/IP traffic, UDP traffic, ICMP traffic, something else? Do you care about specific ports or any data? Is this going to be for a single computer (firewall) or monitoring a subnet? Or maybe you want to monitor which computers are turned on at a given time on a subnet.

[ged25]

Well...I'm not exactly sure.
Maybe I'll be clearer with an example.
I want to monitor the computers in a school lab. I want to know whats happening in each of them. Stuff like who all have logged in a system, what they did, if they did any file transfers and what it was etc.
I hope this made sense.

[WingedPanther]

That sounds like you want to monitor the system activity, rather than the network activity. Each computer would have to run this application.

[ged25]

Ok...can you please give me a basic overview of what network activity constitutes or point me to an article ?

[MeTh0Dz]

Learn the OSI model then come back.

[WingedPanther]

Network activity is communication between a computer and another device over a network (using one of a variety of protocols). A number of the things you mentioned do NOT necessarily involve a network.

You need to get specific about what you want to monitor. This is not a trivial task.

As Methodz noted: the OSI model will help you understand what network activity is and what types of monitoring you can do. You are talking about either having a monitoring device on the network or a low-level application on each library computer.