Hi Hipsters,

Does anyone know of a way in which one can see every Download in Mac OS X, and how much it weighed? Kinda like a Download Log ?

Naturally one can see what one has downloaded in Firefox / Safari / Camino / Speed Download etc, yet what about ALL downloads, including streaming audio / video, email, software updates, Lime Wire, BT, and every mouse click that opens a new page - etc ?

(Or would such a thing only exist as a piece of software?)

cheers,

cw

Netbarrier will record all bandwidth used. Someone asked about this recently.

Thanks Curra - I notice its 5 user liscence is a tad pricey.

I need some way to explain what it is that teenagers do to their parent's monthly download limit, and how they can easily slice through 2GBs in 5 days - especially when Lime Wiring, BT-ing and visiting 100 dreadful MySpace Sites, each with their own streaming audio, every day.

Volume Usage Charts on the ISP show quite clearly that the major downloads occur just after 4:00pm in the afternoon, yet like all parents, the final word is:

"I'm sorry, but my kids would never lie to me, and I've asked them, so it must be something you've done."

=/

cw

That said, if I pinged you with large packets all the time day in day out you'd have to pay for that, too, even if your firewall blocks it. Of course, being on Bigpond and having to pay for uploads I would never do that...

My point being: the current billing system used by ISPs everywhere counts all traffic their router forwarded to you, regardless of whether you (or any of your users) asked for the traffic or not.

Cheers
Steffen.

2 1/2 months ago Bigpond adjusted my billing cycle, since that date my usage has increased from 4 gig to 12 gig per month... they assure me that they have not changed the usage meters and our browsing habits have not significantly changed. To me it seems like too much of a coincidence for it to not be in some way related Basically they told me that it was my problem, happening at my end and that I must have a virus or something, or that my neighbours are using my network... I explained that we have 5 computers all the windows ones have virus protection and that the same ones are not necessarily on at the same times and that up until 2 weeks ago my network was password protected(cant seem to get it working with the mac thou). Is there anyway I can dispute what they are saying? Does this program you are talking about measure the usage in the same way as Bigpond?

http://homepage.mac.com/rominar/net.html

That will take a little bit of effort to setup, but it's only $10.

Thanks

Clockwork: ask what kind of modemrouter they are using (if you don't know already) then check its manual -- many of them can generate logs that will do something pretty close to what you want, and mail the logs to a predefined address regularly (hourly, daily, etc). If the miscreant kiddiwinks have their own computer(s) then getting this kind of data at the router is the only way you're going to get reliable information on who's doing what, as both Netbarrier (severe overkill) and NetMonitor are per-machine.

At the very least, you can do an experiment: if the modemrouter has built-in site blocking smarts (and most do), block youtube.com for 24 hours and then do a comparison on the download quota used ... I know from experience that YouTube is the greatest quota suckers amongst teens, because it is so easy to embed a YouTube video into a webpage (especially Myspace pages).


B.

Brains: Networking is my major weakness in computer knowledge. The modem routers are mainly Netcomms. I've googled: blocking youtube - in all imaginable questions, yet come up empty handed.

In - let's say - a Netcomm NB5Plus4W - one goes to the Advanced Settings > and then into either Port Forwarding or Access Control, yet... I really don't know... what to put into these fields to block YouTube / Google Video - and so forth.

I can google these subjects - but I can't see any tutorials on how to learn how to do these things. Most google results return with answers on how to open those ports.

Help please?

cheers,

cw

all I really know, is YouTube's IP address: 208.65.153.251 - yet I'm barking up the wrong tree here, aren't I...?

thats one of youtube's addresses, but when i was working on blocking youtube at work i noticed there were a range of about 10 ip addresses that it appeared users were accessing, and they all resolved to youtube.

if you can find something on your router called QOS or quality of service, this is the area where you can specify how traffic is sent/received from a particular source or destination. for instance you could enter the range of youtube addresses, and tell the router to only allow speeds of 20-50kbps for youtube. people soon get bored of trying when their video takes an age to download. similarly you can assign bandwidth by internal ip address....for example if a particular user is using too much, you can limit their bandwidth so that they are throttled.

as i say that all depends on the router but i believe there are software solutions that can perform the sameish tasks.

Actually it has 3 ip addresses:
It could though also be streaming data from other servers as well

The trouble is - Gehenna - that I can't find any tutorials on these subjects, and Google is the master teacher of all things these days. I don't know... anyfing about it... and I don't know where to look, or what specific questions to ask.

Downloaded the PDFs for various Modem / Routers - they're all about 120 pages long - and though they explain what various utilities within the modem router does, they provide no examples to learn from - for instance - Port Fowarding has a preset list of IPs that can be opened or closed, yet no mention of how to create one's own, nor what one should key in.

Seeking further education...

understood. can you give a brief rundown on the kind of network you're dealing with? is this a bunch of users on a single computer, or a bunch of computers? are you wanting to prove where traffic is going to/coming from? or just avoid any future occurrences of traffic going astray?


firstly your ISP should be able to provide a report of your usage stats for a particular billing period. this may end up being several hundred pages long but they will provide it if you push. at least then you can skim through and look for patterns of source/destinations of traffic. once you have a better idea of where traffic is going or coming from, then you will have a better plan for how to manage it.

i don't think port forwarding will help you much in this sort of scenario, as most apps and routers support udp now anyway so port forwarding is becoming less and less of a requirement.

is there a section on the router that looks like it is QoS or Quality of Service related? i think it's this kinda area you need to look into. QoS should allow you to specify particular settings per IP address if you have multiple machines on the network. OR if the machines are shared by multiple users you'd need a software monitoring solution on the PC to monitor each users statistics. The latter I probably can't be much help with as I deal more with the hardware solutions.

edit: if you want to know more about port forwarding and how to use it, with examples pertaining to specific router and applications go to www.portforward.com

Well, I just hunted down the manuals for the NB5Plus4W and frankly, it's a piece of labrador poopy. It can't do domain-based blocking. It doesn't generate traffic reports. It does do QoS (Quality of Service, aka traffic prioritisation) but it cannot forcibly limit traffic sub-types. On top of that, the onboard web interface is counter-intuitive and the manual hard to decipher unless you know exactly what the hell everything means (and they don't bother to explain most of it either).

The only way I can think of that would let you block YouTube is to manually edit the Hosts file on each computer connected to the internet, by adding a new entry that points 'youtube.com' and 'video.google.com' to 127.0.0.1

A suggestion would be to buy your own Billion 74xx modemrouter (a small, affordable Aussie-designed unit that can do everything the Netcomm cannot), drop it in place of the client's Netcomm, and have it configured to send you logs. As far as the client is concerned, there would ne no change to their internet, but you would have greater control over what it does and does not allow. It can domain-block, its QoS can forcibly limit traffic to any machine by IP number or even the connection-socket on the built in switch, and it can generate comprehensive traffic reports that can be emailed. It also allows for remote access to the built-in web interface from a single external IP number, so you can play with things from home.


Brains

Thanks for listening Gehenna.

All the situations are the same:

Netcomm Wireless Networks of two to three Apple Mac computers plus ADSL2+ Speeds plus 2GB to 4GB to 10GB Download Limits - PLUS... Teenagers (hundreds of MySpace / YouTube / Google Video / Lime Wire / Bit Torrent / iTunes Store sampling / Networked WarCraft etc - Downloads per day).

Simply the ability to stop all those teenage downloads for 24 to 48 hours, in order to show parents those Volume Usage charts - in turn to show them how "much" they've gone down when those particular downloads have been disabled for 48 hours.

Addit: And to Brains - it's not been a problem until the average user was made aware they could give BigPond's measly 256kpbs downloads @ $79.95 per month, the flick, in turn for other ISPs - Internode etc, for 24,000kpbs speeds...