PC networking question - any techies able to advise?

Posted by: Top Cat on 17 June 2005

Hi folks.

Got a PC which has a network card and is sitting in a colo on a fixed IP address. The colo facility records bandwidth consumed - both inbound and outbound.

Their records show a moderate, constant traffic inbound, and normal outbound traffic. However, the PC's network properties dialog (you know the one, which shows bytes in/out) does not show nearly so much inbound traffic.

My question is: if I have port filtering set for this network card, would the network properties dialog show 'denied' accesses - i.e. inbound traffic which has been blocked due to locked down ports/protocols/etc.?

If it does not include this 'denied' traffic then it would explain why the inbound figures differ between the packet monitoring software I now have running on that PC and the bandwidth meter that the colo ISP provides.

Can anyone advise?

Ta,

John

Posted on: 17 June 2005 by Jack

I assume you're talking windows.....the network properties dialog will not show dropped packets, however, you can set Windows XP SP2 firewall security settings to log dropped packets to a text file. I'm sure most personal firewall products also offer some similar capability.

I'd be a bit concerned about the constant incoming traffic to your PC though?

Posted on: 20 June 2005 by Top Cat

It's a W2K/AS box, sitting in a colo. I ended up calling them and they said it was 'ambient subnet traffic' from other colocated servers:

quote:
You'll find this traffic is standard ARP/broadcast traffic that you'd
expect, remember there are potenitally 250-odd other servers on the same
subnet as yours. We see a small amount of 'white noise' on all customer
ports.

We're paying for 400Gb/month transfer, which we will get NOWHERE close to using up, so this traffic is but a eensy wee fraction of that.

Ta,

John