There are numerous reasons why you would want to watch your network topology or the flow of traffic on your network. Say you are experiencing a bandwidth bottleneck. What is causing that bottleneck? Is it a particular user? A machine gone awry? How do you find out what is happening without having to walk around to every single machine on your network? Easy. The Etherape network monitor gives you a real-time graphical display of your network and the flow of traffic. Using this tool you can easily pinpoint suspect machines. Let’s take a look at exactly how you can use this tool to troubleshoot networking issues.
Installation
Etherape is only available for UNIX and UNIX-like OSs (such as Linux and even OS X). In order to use Etherape you will need:
- libpcap
- GTK+
- Libglade 2
- GNOME
- Standard resolver library (name depends upon OS)