suggest network analyzer for total network newbie?

Developer - know nothing about networking, except that our internet
access provider tells us our traffic occasionally spikes to some very
high level - maxing out our connection - which some people in the
office sometimes notice. I need to find out which PC/device the
traffic is coming from and stop it.

The machine which I would prefer to run any monitoring software from is
Linux, with a `uname` providing:
Linux [my_hostname] 2.6.1-1.65smp #1 SMP Fri Jan 30 17:50:02 EST 2004
i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Looking for something that will help me figure this out. Any suggested
tools?

Thanks.

Hi,

On 2005-05-12, techguy <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Developer - know nothing about networking, except that our internet
> access provider tells us our traffic occasionally spikes to some very
> high level - maxing out our connection - which some people in the
> office sometimes notice. I need to find out which PC/device the
> traffic is coming from and stop it.
>
> The machine which I would prefer to run any monitoring software from is
> Linux, with a `uname` providing:
> Linux [my_hostname] 2.6.1-1.65smp #1 SMP Fri Jan 30 17:50:02 EST 2004
> i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
>
> Looking for something that will help me figure this out. Any suggested
> tools?
>
Well unless you plan on munching on RFC's and learning to digest the output
from (t)ethereal/tcpdump you probably are looking for 'ntop'. This gives a
_very_ simple read out of each IP and how fast it is shunting things.

Another good one is 'iptraf'.

Have fun

Alex