Internet activity software

[citizen]

I am wondering if there is an understandable application to use that shows what programs are accessing the internet.

I am specifically trying to find out if some of my Firefox add-ons are "phoning home", and how often they do this. I'm not sure how this works on Linux.

I'm looking for something that tells me what is phoning, when, how long, and possibly a way to keep it in a log.

I'm not saying it's happening, just a suspicion I have.

Any suggestions?

[SteveRiley]

IPTraf is a console-based traffic monitor that shows inbound and outbound traffic. You have to run it as root: sudo iptraf.

Wireshark is the best-known packet capture and analysis tool available (disclaimer: my employer is the sponsor of the Wireshark project). It takes some time to learn and understand, but it will tell you everything going on.

Ntop is an interesting middle-of-the-road (between the two above options) choice. It will install a few dependencies, including a lightweight web server onto your PC. During installation, specify the interface you want to monitor -- most likely, eth0 for your Ethernet port. Once installation is finished, point a web browser to http://localhost:3000/ and you can see the traffic that's passed through your computer. Play around inside the menus to look at the various ways the information is collected and grouped.

The above items are in the *buntu repositories. Not in the repository is a new version of Ntop, called Ntopng (read, download). The graphs from Ntopng seem prettier. However, it has dropped the small internal web server and instead relies on Apache. I think running Apache on a workstation is a but much. But you might not object.