[uochris]

Last night I noticed that netmonitor was showing traffic coming in to my machine at about 20KB/s. The odd thing is that it was the only program I had open so there should have been little to no network traffic at all. I headed to the terminal and ran netstat -f inet to see what connections I had open. According to the output I didn't have any outside connections open. What I was hoping for was to see if any of the connections it showed were actively increasing the byte and packet count but no dice. I unplugged my ethernet cable and sure enough traffic dropped to 0 and when I plugged it in it started showing I was downloading something again. I rebooted the machine and as soon as netmonitor was up it showed I was still getting roughly 20KB/s coming in to my machine.

I found a program called iptraf for linux that can show live statistics for each network connection along with bytes and packets for each. After reading the man page for netstat I still couldn't see how you could get it to show you a live representation of all established network traffic and statistics on each connection. Is there something I'm just missing with netstat or is there an iptraf equivalent for OS X? Is there another good way to see exactly what network connections are doing on my computer?

[Arkham_c]

Ethereal or tcpflow will help you solve your question. Ethereal is a packet analyzer, and tcpflow records incoming and outgoing data transmissions to a file.

Both are free, open source.