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Who's using my router?

B

bingefeller

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 25, 2007
618
42
Northern Ireland
Hey guys,

This might be a stupid question, but is there any software that'll tell me what computers are browsing the web via my router? It's a Netgear DG834G. There's no particular reason I'm asking, just for curiosity sake really. I was thinking Netstat might be able to tell me something, but I don't really see anything relevant there that could help me.
 
<rant>well don't know to much about mac commands but on windows using the net view command will show who is on your current workgroup. a good thing to do from the router is setup permissions especially if you are wireless. Setup a mac address filter and only allow the mac addresses of those who are on your network and setup wep strong login password and only allow the number ip addresses to the amout of computers you have on your network. </rant>
 
bingefeller said:
Hey guys,

This might be a stupid question, but is there any software that'll tell me what computers are browsing the web via my router? It's a Netgear DG834G. There's no particular reason I'm asking, just for curiosity sake really. I was thinking Netstat might be able to tell me something, but I don't really see anything relevant there that could help me.
Click to expand...

Look on the router's admin page there should be a link or button called DHCP. There you will see all the addresses of people using your router.
 
Login into the Netgear Router manager (www.routerlogin.com is my Netgear's one) and see what is up under Maintenance --> Attached Devices…


bingefeller said:
Hey guys,

This might be a stupid question, but is there any software that'll tell me what computers are browsing the web via my router? It's a Netgear DG834G. There's no particular reason I'm asking, just for curiosity sake really. I was thinking Netstat might be able to tell me something, but I don't really see anything relevant there that could help me.
Click to expand...
 
bingefeller said:
Hey guys,

This might be a stupid question, but is there any software that'll tell me what computers are browsing the web via my router? It's a Netgear DG834G. There's no particular reason I'm asking, just for curiosity sake really. I was thinking Netstat might be able to tell me something, but I don't really see anything relevant there that could help me.
Click to expand...

Nobody else quite nailed it so I'll throw in my 2 cents:

You can look at your router's DHCP table, but that only shows you people who have gotten a dynamic IP address on your network. Anybody with a static IP won't show up in that list.

If you look in your Windows workgroup, that's only going to show you people on your network with Windows sharing turned on (who are also in the same workgroup as you).

If you really, really want to see who's using your network, you need a packet sniffer. I'm not sure of any that exist for MacOS, but there is a good one for Linux called Ethereal. If you play around with this program you will probably be shocked by what you find out. You can see *every* piece of data going through your network, and the program is actually smart enough to identify the application that created the packet (in many cases) and to interpret the packet accordingly.

The net result is you can see what programs people are running, what websites they are visiting, what's in their e-mails, even follow their AIM chat conversations.

It's a real wake up call to secure your network. Don't worry about MAC filtering or AP beacons, just avoid WEP at all costs and use WPA with a strong password.
 
Thanks guys. It's not that I'm worried about my router being abused, I just wanted to know for the sake of education. Where I live I have a lot of elderly neighbours and I've never even picked up another wireless network in my area.

Thanks again.
 
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