Bandwidth Meter

[lintz]

Apparently we (our team of 7) downloaded 59GB in 4 days which is virtually impossible! As a result we don't trust our ISP bandwidth meter anymore and want to install one in the office to see what we 'really' use.

Does anyone use or know of any programs that can be installed on a single machine and record all internet transfers for the 7 computers on our LAN?

[Lord Orwell]

1.5 gb per computer per day DOES seem a little steep. You aren't going to be able to install anything on a single machine that records the bandwidth to all the other machines. You either have to have the functionality in your router or route through a proxy that records it or have a meter on each individual computer and add the result up. Note that if you have wireless someone may be stealing your bandwidth or you may have a trojan using bandwidth for emailing etc etc.

[vbcode1980]

1.5 Gb per day doesn't seem that steep at all.
Download a dvd ISO and you've got 4 Gb already.

Perhaps everyone downloaded the same linux distro?

On a more serious note: Du Meter can measure your data transfer.
It needs to be installed on each pc, though.

[lintz]

I have DuMeter installed at home. It would just be a pain to install it on all machines and then get each user to email me their usage logs each week.

Thanks for the suggestion

[Lord Orwell]

windows update could have pushed a big one to you. Do you video conference or anything?

[lintz]

I know 1 machine d/l SP3 but it was not on one of the days in question. And no, no video conferencing.

[Lord Orwell]

that's not that big of a download anyway. Assuming a normal ethernet hookup, you can simply look at packets sent/received by highlighting the icon in the system tray to see if one of the computers is using an inordinate amount of bandwidth. The one with the most packets is using the most (obviously) but if one of them is using a whole lot more than the others, it needs to be looked into. Do you have any mail servers running? anything like that? What the heck exactly DO they do on the computers?

[vbcode1980]

I have DuMeter installed at home. It would just be a pain to install it on all machines and then get each user to email me their usage logs each week.

And what if you ask them to install it themselves?

Or are you afraid someone is downloading 'inappropriate' stuff and won't cooperate?

[03myersd]

I have DuMeter installed at home. It would just be a pain to install it on all machines and then get each user to email me their usage logs each week.

Thanks for the suggestion

How about setting up another computer as a proxy and routing all traffic through that? That way you can put the program on just that one computer.