Monitoring, analyzing, and controlling your
Internet traffic
Your employers can't legally eavesdrop on your telephone conversations, but they can still snoop into your network access. Kansmen has developed
LittleBrother, a software product for the Orwell enthusiast in all of us for peering into our fellow workers' Internet access.
LittleBrother monitors, analyzes, and controls the Internet traffic on your
LAN. It runs under Windows NT or Windows 95, and it doesn't require much
technical skill to use. You don't need to reconfigure your network to start
monitoring Internet activity on your LAN; you just need a PC with an Ethernet
connection. The standard edition of LittleBrother lets you view Internet
traffic. The professional (Pro) edition provides the same monitoring and
reporting features as the standard version plus tools for blocking access to
specific Web sites.
Reports
LittleBrother inspects all the traffic on the LAN and breaks it out into
Web, FTP, and newsgroup traffic by user, site, protocol, bytes transferred, and
capacity used. This breakdown includes how much bandwidth each application
(e.g., Web, FTP, Telnet, mail, news) uses; who uses the most resources, as you
see in Screen 1; and which sites users visit the most, as you see in
Screen 2.
You can choose from several reporting and viewing options to display
the results. The software lets you use bar graphs and line charts to summarize
the network traffic. It can also show you the name or IP address of any sites
your users are accessing, although you can't see what users are doing on those
sites. You can generate reports for Top Talker, Top Site, User Detail, Site
Detail, Daily and Hourly Overview, IP Tables, and an Overview.
The Top Talker report lists usage per user in descending order. The Top
Sites report lists each site that users access as measured by time or volume.
The User Detail and Site Detail reports list the users and the sites they
access. The Daily and Hourly reports display each day's and hour's usage. The
software rates usage within these reports as productive, unproductive, neutral,
and not rated. You can generate reports showing all the ratings or just some of
them. These reports give you an overview of how productive or unproductive your
Internet access is each day or hour.
LittleBrother has more than 40 different categories, such as Education,
News, TV/Video, and Sex/Porn, which you can edit with the separate site rating
utility that comes with the software. Administrators can provide a rating
(Productive, Unproductive, Neutral, or Not Rated) for each category. Each of the
ratings displayed in the reports has a unique color. Administrators can also
password protect site ratings to prevent users from modifying access permissions
or site ratings.
To help identify the users on your network and their configuration, the IP
Tables report shows the properties, including IP Address, Machine Address,
Computer Name, User Name, and LAN Adapter Vendor, for each computer. Finally,
the Overview report shows the overall Internet traffic pattern of your LAN. The
first section divides all Internet traffic into the four different ratings, and
the second section notes all Internet traffic by the different categories.
Access and Blocking
In addition to providing Internet access monitoring, LittleBrother Pro lets
you build access rules to permit or prevent access to specific Web sites. You
can specify a site by domain name or IP address, or you can specify a group of
sites by selecting a category.
These access rules are LittleBrother Pro's most powerful feature. Site
blocking is rules-based, so setting and updating access privileges for
individuals or whole groups is easy. You can also enable access privileges
according to the time of day. This capability lets you block certain sites
company-wide, enable certain groups to view select sites, and allow free access
after work hours or during lunch. The rules are easy to edit, and you can add
new rules as needed.