monitoring my network.... a handful of noob questions
 

i got a micosoft base station, wireless router, i was looking at the management tool and noticed this window


on this list there was the three computers of which i expected to see, plus a fourth, it's computer name was the same as my computer name, "laptop,"... but it has a different mac address, and if i remember correctly that is a number that never changes on computers?... i'm not 100% sure what this computer is, it might be the other laptop i've had on the network a week or soo ago.... do computers just stay on this list even after they log off, or how long do they stay on for... or whats the scope??



is there a way to monitor the computers on my network, or even something i could get that would list the active computers in a window?? to monitor their bandwith usage? see what they are doing online? the bandwith montioring part would be super awesome.... even more awesome to see what they are doing online with that bandwidth




i never really played around with networking much... i've done shared printers and shared folders... but not much more than that.... if anyone can enlightment me to what all else i could do, i wouldn't mind at all ;)

Well, you could have more than 2 network devices on your laptop, get on your laptop and open a command prompt (run > cmd) type 'getmac' (with out the quotes) that will list all the mac addresses for your system. If the mac address (or mac addresses) don’t match the ones under dhcp, you may have some one else on your network, if you are a noob, I guess the network is just an open network with out any type of encryption or limitation on who can connect to it. It could very well be that you had your laptop connected through a Ethernet cable and through wireless, that would do it right there. both devices have different macs.

2nd, you can easily spoof a mac address in some operating systems.

Yes, the computers stay on the DHCP list even after they are no longer connected. I'm not sure exactly how long, but it probably has something to do with the DHCP lease time.

As dilbert mentioned, the fourth computer you are wondering about could be your computer if you connected both wired and wirelessly with your laptop. Each network card has a unique mac address, so your wired and wireless network cards will show up as two separate entities.

I'm not sure about monitoring network activity. I know my router has basic logging capabilities, so I can see a list of all the sites that have been accessed over a certain time period. You could check your router to see if it has anything like that.

hehe thats it, i actually was connected with both wireless and an ethernet cable that day!




i went to type in get mac, i went to run, typed in cmd, the black box thing opened, i typed in 'getmac' and it didnt work? i'm on xp home ..


as for security, it's fully secure, 128bit, i'm not a noob when it comes to the basics, i just don't know anything about monitoring it and stuff, like i mentioned in the above post




... as for my router, it has a "base station log"... it's a long list of nearly identical entries that say

"2006/02/14 20:54:22 Connection attempt to base station from WAN blocked ........"


i have no real clue of what the heck these are even for

hmmm, if getmac does not work, try

ipconfig /all

that will list all the details about your network adapters, including mac

yep that works, all is good

That's the router's built in firewall. It's blocking conenction attempts from the internet. 99 times out of 100 they're just random pings from port scanners and such. Nothing to be concerned about, as long as they're getting blocked.