internet traffic limiting in college

mikemac
Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:25:40 +0000

Yeah, but how would they monitor the individual ethernet ports? The only way they could do it would be to monitor the specific hub that the port is in, and even then, they have to ID by IP/MAC addresses anyway.

Hubs? No such creature anymore, not in networks of any size or built within the past few years anyway. Networks are built out of switches and routers. Your ethernet wall jack is connected to a switch, and that switch can easily monitor how much traffic it sends to a given port. In fact that is a selling feature for the switches After that all the admins have to do is write a script that periodically collects the stats, accumulate the data, and do something when the limit is exceeded.

See http://lists.sans.org/pipermail/unisog/2003-May/018882.html for a description by somebody doing just that. Google “netflow statistics” if you want to see what info can be monitored.