Network monitoring software for schools

is_that_so

I have been asked to recommend software for a school so that they can monitor and control a network. Not being very familiar with software for schools I'd appreciate any thoughts. Is there a standard package that schools use for this? Does anyone know of suppliers?

Cake Fiend

What exactly do they want to monitor? Bandwidth use? Times of access? Web sites viewed? Internal server access? All of the above?

For outbound access, you'd want a proxy server of some sort with various monitoring tools. Depending on the size of the site, it might be worth looking at something like Smoothwall - the latest beta has some interesting bandwidth monitoring stuff on it, and both stable and beta run a squid caching proxy, with a web-based log-viewing interface.

If there are internal servers that you need stats on, you'd probably need to install something on the machines themselves; maybe you could have them report back to a central monitoring server. I can't recommend anything off the top of my head for this, but I'm sure there are other posters with experience in this area.

bushy...

Ntop will show you a good bit of info , it can watch Netflow streams

is_that_so

Thanks for suggestions guys.
In the main they want to make sure that people are not up to no good, restrict times, sites, p2p etc , and obviously bandwidth usage is of interest. They are non-techies so they don't want too much to look at. Smoothwall does looks interesting

ondafly

for commercial products : try websense, bluecoat, or surfcontrol.

joePC

Use Censornet Version 4, Excellent piece of software very cheap and runs rock solid on debian.

_CreeD_

If you're monitoring internal activity add an IDS/IPS like Snort (free) to the list , just make sure your Switches can enable a monitoring port. Netflow monitors as were mentioned are a good choice, again so long as your hardware supports Netflow - Adventnet make a very good one too, they also make an excellent Firewall traffic analyzer.
Network Device health/monitoring Nagios or Hyperic are good options. Both free.

A combination of the above and the Web filters already mentioned will give you excellent visibility of network activity at all levels.

Capt'n Midnight

if your switches don't have monitoring port ability, simply get a small HUB and put the connection you want to monitor and the one monitoring it on the same HUB.