Description
TrafficWatch is a small utility to get information about the amount of data transferred
to and from the internet. It uses the WinPcap library from http://winpcap.polito.it/docs/default.htm.
Network traffic inside a LAN is ignored - only IP packets going through the standard gateway
are measured.
Traffic is also measured by service: FTP, mail, news, web, UDP and others. So you can see for what you need your internet connection.
Why?
Flat rates are getting more common these days. ISPs often offer them only up to a specified amount of traffic - additional
transferred data must be paid extra. So I wanted to know exactly how much traffic I use/need to decide which ISP and which
offer I wanted. And of course I'm curious :)
Implementation
To gather only the internet traffic and ignore traffic inside LAN I needed a way to analyse every IP data packet entering
or leaving the network interface. The WinPcap library is used to catch all these packets. Then the program analyses
the captured packets by source and destination IP and port. With these data the program builds the statistics.
Other tools
There are other tools in this utility: Ping, Traceroute, Connection Information and Whois.
The Whois-utility uses a text file to determine which server to ask for specific TLD's. The one
offered with this utility is far from complete. If someone wants to complete it, please send me
a copy!
Installation
An installer is provided. If you don't have WinPcap already installed, you must either download it
from http://winpcap.polito.it/docs/default.htm or
let the installer install it for you. After installation you should maybe restart your computer to
proper initialize the WinPcap drivers - otherwise the program may crash.
Notes
For this tool I used many classes and tips from this website. Some of them are unchanged, some of
them I changed a little or more. This tool is also kind of a try out project for me - whenever I want to
try out some API's or functions I add them to this tool. An example of that you can see in the "About" pane.
So please don't blame me if some things are not perfectly coded.
Update
16.11.02 fixed several bugs where the prog crashed on startup (I hope :). Also the statistics page now shows
a red line in the bars to separate up from downloads.
22.6.02 corrected a bug where the statistics weren't correctly cleaned up. Fixed a bug where the program crashed when more than
10 adapters were found. Also fixed missing files in source.
