Assigning network packets to applications

Stky10

Dont know if I should add this here or the networks section but anyway...

We have a WinXP machine here thats generating a lot of outward packets
that dont seem to have any relevance to what the machine is doing. I've
run adaware, spybot, etc and norton anti-virus and they only show up
a few cookies and thats it.

I've run ethereal on it, and I can see the dns requests and other traffic
being generated, and I've run anti-spy.info to check the running processes,
but I cant tell what process/application is generating this traffic...

So... I'm just wondering if there is an application that shows packets that
are generated from a machine, and also what application is responsible for
generating the packets.

gibo_ie

if you run netstat -a from a dos command window you can see which ports are opening and communicating. By default there are quite a few of (almost) useless traffic outbound. If worried get Zonealarms personal fiewall from zonelabs - it is free and will block unnneded traffic. i have it installed even though i am behind a corporate firewall and works great.

SantaHoe

Have a look at TCP view from sysinternals (it's free)
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml
It's pretty good, not as low level as ethereal, it'll only show you what apps are actively accessing the net, not specific packet info... but it does the trick and has a more digestable UI than something running from the command line.

azezil

When you try to access any website there's about 8 steps, first contacting the dns, confirmation, contacting the site, resolving host name etc., looks like a lot of packets flying about but that's normal

But as gibo_ie said if you're really concerned try zone alarm it blocks everything then asks you what you do and don't want to access the net.

Stky10

I used TCPView and it seems to be skype that was generating most of the traffic. I've shut it down and things seem to be much better. I'll leave it be for a while and see whether things remain as are or return to the way they were.

Cheers...