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Gasp0de

Member

Registered: 2012-12-24

Posts: 47

[SOLVED] Mysterious network traffic showing up in gnome system monitor

Hi Guys.
I had a very slow video stream on youtube today, and when i opened gnome system monitor to find out how fast it was loading, i noticed something strange. My Laptop seems to be permanently receiving about 50 kB/s when i'm connected to the internet. I installed nethogs, which is a program that can tell you which process uses how much traffic, but the traffic doesn't show up there. Any ideas how i can find out what is causing this would be greatly appreciated as i'm getting a little paranoid here...

Gasp0de

Last edited by Gasp0de (2014-08-11 20:20:34)

lahwaacz

Wiki Admin

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2012-05-29

Posts: 764

Re: [SOLVED] Mysterious network traffic showing up in gnome system monitor

Use tcpdump or wireshark to see what's going on.

Gasp0de

Member

Registered: 2012-12-24

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] Mysterious network traffic showing up in gnome system monitor

I will do that next, but if i understand correctly, this will be a lot of work to get into. In the meantime, i killed every single process that 'netstat -tulpen' gave me. Didn't help, traffic is still there. I used wireshark to dump all traffic on my wifi interface. A tremendous amount of packages seems to be communication with the router for control purposes. A great deal of packets sent seem to be "Router Solicitation"-Messages via ICMPv6. As far as i understand, this is something similar to neighbour discovery, like the router asking "Are you still there?". However, this does seem to have gotten a little out of control, there are hundreds of packets each second. Any tips? If you want, i can do a capture and upload it somewhere?

Gasp0de

Last edited by Gasp0de (2014-08-10 22:49:34)

Gasp0de

Member

Registered: 2012-12-24

Posts: 47

Re: [SOLVED] Mysterious network traffic showing up in gnome system monitor

In case anyone ever gets interested: The traffic was caused by the very bad wifi connection. It seems that yesterday, my ISP upgraded the firmware in my modem, which caused it to switch on the internal wifi. I am using my own wifi-router though. The modems wifi sent on the same frequency as my own router, which caused tons of packets to be sent between my laptop and the wifi-router, just to make sure the connection was still alive. This traffic showed up in gnome system monitor, but not in nethogs. I asked the ISP to switch wifi off again, as i cant control it myself, but they refused. I just wrapped it in aluminium foil and everything works fine again.

Gasp0de

alphaniner

Member

From: Ancapistan

Registered: 2010-07-12

Posts: 2,810

Re: [SOLVED] Mysterious network traffic showing up in gnome system monitor

Sounds like you were dealing with a lazy and/or ignorant technician. I can hardly believe that you aren't given control over it, much less that they won't configure it as you request.

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But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
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