Monitoring my Internet connection

What pages/files/servers are my programs accessing?

[MatthewHSE]

I know I could get programs like NIS that would tell me when a program on my computer is trying to access the Internet. But the question I have isn't when a program goes online, but where it goes online. And so far, none of the alleged security products that I've seen provide this information.

There must be a way to monitor this, but I don't know how to do it. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Matthew

[coopster]

ZoneAlarm Pro list the Destination IP in the Alerts/Logs entries. I don't know if the free version of the same product has that feature though.

[2by4]

You're looking for a network monitor I assume, there's tons of options out there, but to work the way I'd assume you want it to, all the clients need to send http requests through a proxy server, and the proxy server would log the connections requests.

ethereal is popular for live monitoring, I don't know what its capacities are in terms of restricting the logged events to just the initial connections though.

There are hundreds of apps I'd guess that do some type of network monitoring like that.

[keno]

I have not heard of NIS. Norton...?

ZoneAlarm Free version detects when an application tries to connect to the internet and it will ask permission first. You can set it on autopilot for each app. It's a charm - and free.

Ethereal is on a different level really and can track your PC's conversation with other IP addresses in English. It has saved my bacon more than once but at the level of 1XRTT-CDMA and GPRS-GSM and plain old TCP-IP kind of stuff.

These are two great utilities IMO, but you can use ZoneAlarm Free for every day PC use.

Add
I see ZA Free showing blocked ip addresses and a few allowed, but it doesn't seem to show general browser activity.

Ethereal would certainly answer the where question, but you have more set up to do.

[RonPK]

Kerio Personal Firewall shows the destinations of outgoing traffic and sources of incoming traffic, in real time. It does not show the requested URLs, only the server names (or IP addresses, if non-resolvable).