Ever wanted to see what your network traffic is doing and if there are any background transmissions slowing down your internet? But you don’t want to be a network admin to be able to figure out the stats from log files and traceroutes, right! Well, check this out – Etherape, a visual network traffic tool for Linux. I downloaded it using my package manager Synaptic, searching for the keyword: Etherape.

Once you download it, there will be several icons off your menu systems. You have to Use the Etherape (root) icon in Applications | Internet for it to work, otherwise it’ll open with an error. It has to be used as root.

Or open your Terminal as root then enter, “cd /” then “cd /usr/bin/” and then “sudo etherape”. You might have to type in your root admin password at this point to run it from the Terminal.

Yes, I have blocked out some of the IP addresses, but you get a general feel for how it looks. The size of the line grows and shrinks as network traffic increase and decreases to different addresses and services on your network. Pretty sweet!

If you click on View | Protocols you can see a simple status breakdown of all the network traffic, to go a bit more granular in your investigations. From this tool, I found that my Lenny distro was running a bunch of “extra” protocols that I didn’t need – such as mDNS, which I removed to optimize my internet connection even more.

I am on a network with Windows computers, so some of this traffic in my grid is theirs but then I have a good reason to yell at them for playing World of Warcraft when I’m trying to publish this blog, right!