Recently, I started obsessing over network traffic on my (recently upgraded) Ubuntu 12.04 system. This is what it looked like, with only a few user processes (just chromium and synergyc).
Screenshot of Ubuntu’s System Monitor Network Traffic
I could never pin down a process that was causing the traffic; netstat -p and nethogs reported the bulk of traffic from an unknown PID. It may have been malicious, or simply a weird Ubuntu issue.
So, naturally I did what I do when I’m paranoid. I wiped and reinstalled. Since I didn’t want the Unity desktop, anyway, I figured it was time to try something new. Fedora 17, with Cinnamon.
Contrast the Ubuntu traffic above with the Fedora traffic here.
Screenshot of Fedora’s System Monitor Network History
That one blip is Banshee pulling the next song from my NAS. And where I had no user processes running in Ubuntu, this Fedora traffic includes a torrent trickle (10kB/s limits), my media player, and synergy. Nethogs shows very little traffic from sources it can’t determine.
Screenshot of nethogs on Fedora 17
I also have ntop running now. More on that, later.
And finding Cinnamon was a big silver-lining in this whole process.
say what?
Hy Mayerson The i magin AIR ium : @ The Meeting House : Law Offices, Gallery, Visual Hall & High Sundry Recording Studio 3540 Schuylkill Rd, (PA Rt 724) at Mennonite Church Rd Spring City PA 19475 610 948 4800