Andrew, Jesse, it's interesting to me to see where your mind went when I said "monitor network usage". To be clear I'm not looking to restrict anything or impose any policies. That's not my style at all. Perhaps a few use cases are in order.
1) We currently track when people come in by having a sign-in sheet at the front desk. Sometimes they forget to sign in. Since everyone here uses the network, we could use that to track their presence. 2) Sometimes a user will leave a torrent client running on their laptop and suck up all our bandwidth. I'd like a way to figure out who it is without having to yell across the office "Who's the network hog?!?!" 3) I can see fun ways to display some ambient information about what people are doing such as a graph of % of blog reading by the hour. I'm thinking along the lines of the OK Cupid Blog (http://blog.okcupid.com/) I'm looking for fun things to do with our members and any addition can not in any way negatively impact the user experience (said previously as 'unobtrusive'). There are two distinct parts to this. 1) Gather data 2) Display findings. I was specifically asking for tools to help gather data. NetReg was a great tip. It looks a little long in the tooth though and I'm not sure how active the community is behind it. They posted a bug fix release in February so that's something. PFSense 2.0 looks to have some cool features that could work well too. I need to play around a bit. I am also looking for folks who are interested in working on this with me. If I liked working alone I wouldn't have started a coworking space. :) Jacob --- Office Nomads - Individuality without Isolation http://www.officenomads.com - (206) 323-6500 On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:03 AM, MATSU TECHNICAL SERVICES, LLC < [email protected]> wrote: > Barracuda Networks makes a web filter that is an appliance which sets > between your router and the broadband modem. Even if you don't use the > filtering features it has extremely thorough monitoring and report > utilities. It is agentless so there is nothing to install. Just be sure you > notify your members before engaging in any monitoring and/or filtering to > avoid any privacy issues. > > > Jesse L. Jones, Owner > MATSU TECHNICAL SERVICES, LLC > 888.806.2587 > > Sent from my Windows Mobile phone and protected by Norton Smartphone > Security. > > ------------------------------ > From: Andrew Badera <[email protected]> > Sent: Monday, August 16, 2010 9:46 PM > To: [email protected] > > Subject: Re: [Coworking] Passive Network Monitoring > > On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Jacob Sayles <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> I'm researching ways to monitor network usage that is unobtrusive and >> invisible to the users of our space. We considered requiring everyone to >> login to the system but I'm not sure how to indefinitely log someone in and >> our residents don't want to have to log in every day on every device. One >> thought I had was to export the ARP table of our firewall and match the mac >> addresses to individual users in our member database. That is rather crude >> and only gets us who's on, when. Any other tricks/tools people are using? >> Anyone interested in forming a working group to explore this together? >> >> > Why monitor the usage of paying, adult customers to begin with? > > That said, plenty of firewalls have logs that track these things. Syslog > can be used on many of the more decent firewall/routers as well. Or, put up > a simple proxy for outside access. > > ∞ Andy Badera > ∞ +1 518-641-1280 Google Voice > ∞ This email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private > ∞ Google me: http://www.google.com/search?q=andrew%20badera > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Coworking" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<coworking%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.c > > [The entire original message is not included] > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Coworking" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<coworking%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
