Internet monitoring tool.

[Capt. Picard]

I'm looking for a PC monitoring tool that can show which sites was visited and how much internet data was downloaded from that particular site over a certain period.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

[evilghost]

Will your switch/hub support a port span? If so, you'd have to span the port the DSL modem is on to intercept the HTTP/HTTPS requests and their endpoints. Anything that's client-side is going to be inaccurate and likely easily circumvented.

[Capt. Picard]

How inaccurate do you mean? If it is 90% accurate it will still be good enough. And nobody over here has the savvy to circumvent this if this is what you mean.

[evilghost]

Honestly, you know what I would do? I'd setup a SQUID proxy server and create a username/password for each user, or, just use IP Address. I'd then force everyone to use the proxy server and you'd have very detailed information about what's being downloaded/etc instead of going with monitoring software on each PC.

Create a firewall rule on the DSL modem to only permit TCP 80/TCP 443 from the IP address of the SQUID proxy.

http://www.squid-cache.org/
Win32 port from http://www.acmeconsulting.it/SquidNT/

SQUID can be run on Win32 so no Linux needed. Or you can pay for a license for Microsoft ISA; I'd rather use SQUID.

[evilghost]

Once you're using SQUID you could use any of the report generators like SARG or SRG. Here's an example SARG report:

http://sarg.sourceforge.net/squid-reports/2004Aug06-2004Sep13/index.html

[JOPS]

Yepp, Squid is the way to go. It works great. I use a setup similar to the one described both at work and at home. But I don't care about user specific statistics so it doesn't require authentication. I just want a transparent proxy with caching, content filtering and site statistics.

This iptables rule on a Linux-based router forces all unencrypted HTTP traffic to go through Squid:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth1 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3128

[evilghost]

Yepp, Squid is the way to go. It works great. I use a setup similar to the one described both at work and at home. But I don't care about user specific statistics so it doesn't require authentication. I just want a transparent proxy with caching, content filtering and site statistics.

This iptables rule on a Linux-based router forces all unencrypted HTTP traffic to go through Squid:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth1 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3128

Agree, I love SQUID at home, especially when doing dist-upgrades on more than one machine. I've got my cache setup to cache large objects as well as small.