Actually they don't all cost a fortune. You can pick up a cheap managed switch these days. We have like 20 of these "Nortel Baystack 450"s at my company that we used to use for development for our NAC product. They sell on eBay for about $50, we've gotten some as cheap as $7 + shipping. Hell, I've found an Asanti IntraCore 3524 in great condition (that I have sitting here at my desk) laying by the trash pile that some other company in our building was tossing out. eBay for "managed switch" and sort by price, lowest first.
Having said all that, I would just go with a software traffic monitor like the ones previously mentioned. Dealing with a manged switch is absolutely no fun unless you're either really into Layer 2 or 3 masochism, cryptic commands, and have a pant-load of computers you need vlans and stuff for. BTW, that 'trafshow' tool is pretty slick! I've never used it before. Thanks Drew Tomlinson. One bug that I notice though, is that I run several vhosts, and when I hit some of the web sites, they all show up as the same domain name. For example, I go to hit http://daevid.com and it shows up in the list as http://anotherdomain.com :-| Daevid Vincent Lockdown Networks: Real NAC Right Now! Senior Software Engineer | Architect | Founder 206.285.8080.104 100 West Harrison Street, North Tower, Suite 300 | Seattle, WA 98119 > -----Original Message----- > From: Alan McKinnon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > There's one other way that I just remembered (for future > reference). You > don't *have* to use a linux machine as a gateway if you have a decent > managed switch - set it to route all traffic on all ports out through > the port that a monitoring machine is connected to. In other words, > that one part acts like a hub. Now that the monitoring > machine can see > every bit on the entire Ethernet, it can count 'em :-) > > However, these switches cost a fortune and I very much doubt that the > el-cheapo ADSL routers on the market have this feature. Both of mine > certainly don't. -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
