Monitoring Modem Activity through LAN.

[First Man]

Hi buddies

Being a system admin and to implement company rules, I would like to
monitor the activities of company employees. Without going into
privacy issues, I just want to see if somebody is using his/her pc for
online activity, and preferably the websites as well (plus msn/yahoo
chatting if possible).

I understand there are a number of software for network activity
monitoring, but all that I know are for LAN.

In our office, although we have a building lan (20 PCs) but internet
activity is all via dialup modems on individual PCs. So how would it
be possible to monitor (via LAN) their activities that they are doing
via THEIR modems???

Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

Cheers.

 

[First Man]

Hi All

Thanks to all the respondents. I understand that it is not the best
way to monitor and web access via LAN is the preferred method. W are
planning to go towards the same direction, but in the meantime, I
would like to have at least some monitoring.

I forgot to mention a few more details. The Server is Windows NT 4,
while the clients are running Win XP/98. Now is there any way to setup
admin share (\\workstation01\c$) on each machine or is it enabled by
default. What do I need to do to get it done? Also, it will indicate
only the past activity. Is there any way to monitor if some user is
currently active (eg packet monitoring through LAN for the activity
which is going on remote modems)?

Any help in this regard will be very much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Dave Lowther]

Thanks to all the respondents. I understand that it is not the best
way to monitor and web access via LAN is the preferred method. W are
planning to go towards the same direction, but in the meantime, I
would like to have at least some monitoring.

I forgot to mention a few more details. The Server is Windows NT 4,
while the clients are running Win XP/98. Now is there any way to setup
admin share (\\workstation01\c$) on each machine or is it enabled by
default. What do I need to do to get it done? Also, it will indicate
only the past activity. Is there any way to monitor if some user is
currently active (eg packet monitoring through LAN for the activity
which is going on remote modems)?

I don't know of any off the shelf code to do the job.

It shouldn't be difficult to write an application to run on the PCs to
monitor modem activity.

The monitoring application could capture packets off the modem link and
write info to a share or send them on the LAN.

If I had to do this I'd look at using WinPcap (but I'm not sure if it can
capture from dial up modem links):
http://winpcap.polito.it/install/default.htm

Dave

 

[David Candy]

The Lan ones work on modems. See Netcap.