Re: Detecting Loss of Data Stream in LAN

On a sunny day (Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:43:15 GMT) it happened
katamasouth@xxxxxxxxxxx (Terry) wrote in <4911d9aa.3161064@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:


If this is the incorrect group for this, please advise a better one.

I have a home ethernet LAN with 4 PCs. Works just fine. However, my
ISP is displaying miserable performance, i.e., I lose the web several
times a day for a few seconds to maybe an hour. Not every day, but
enough to be annoying. We've all been there!

What I would like to do is monitor the data stream for presence or
loss and log the loss and restore times.

What exactly do you mean?
I dunno about MS Widows soft, but I run a similar system with Linux.

There is a whole lot of tools available.

I use 'snort' to monitor traffic http://www.snort.org/
Maybe you can run a Linux PC.
You can make it look at specific packets, ports or IP addresses,
have it log data, look at the contents of packets in ASCII, etc.


I'm sure there is software out there--preferably free of course :)
--that I might use, but I'm not enough of an IT soul to sort it out.
Any suggestions on that approach?

Another approach I'm also interested in is to monitor the data stream
with external hardware and interface the loss/restore times and dates
through a port on a dedicated PC, many of which I have sitting here
now doing nothing.

Other useful tools are:
traceroute to follow the path of a connection to an IP address.
ping to get delay times
route about yor routing
ifconfig to see your configuration
netstat to see who is connected


Re hardware--I could use the activity LED on the modem as an
indication, but that's clunky and the ISP would have a fit. Or I could
take the same approach on the activity LED in my wireless router, but
am hoping there's another approach.

I think you need no hardware.
You likely have some router, and that router may have NAT tables,
a server DNS server, DHCP for auto network configuration,
you should at least check that those are correctly configured.


Any thoughts and/or ideas/suggestions? This would make a good winter
project!

Get Linux.

All the tools are free.
.

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