I went to cnet downloads looking for a free firewall. Well they have some, or shall I say some number of thousands of them. I read user reviews on Zone Alarm and many say it's junk, crashes their systems, hard to uninstall, etc. Not going there. I remember recently someone saying in here that when they searched their local drive their firewall was telling them something was transmitting to a server in Redmond at One Microsoft Way...interesting. I'd like to install something, whether firewall or whatever, that records incoming and outgoing traffic. I don't need to see what data sent, but for example, I would like to be able to visit a website and do something, then look at the log to see what incoming and outgoing traffic went on during that time. This is just a matter of curiosity - not a security issue and not on a trading box. So I don't want to spend money. Does anyone have a recommendation as to what free application could accomplish this? Thanks.
WireShark is a sophisticated packet sniffer. You can filter for all sorts of things such as IP addresses, protocols etc. It is very capable. I doubt that you will find anything better for free.
I did it. That was an incredible experience. Everyone should do that at least once to see what really goes on when they connect. I ran it for less then a minute. First idle, then I popped open a browser to the local newspaper. I did not count all the thousands of hits (packets) but I went through them and was shocked at what really goes on. I wanted it so I can see what's happening when I connect to a particular mail account where I get about a 20 second latency when logging in. I have not figured that out yet but I will. I did not keep it open too long because there was lots of funny stuff bouncing around the network I'm on and I did not want them to nuke me so I shut it down. But I'll fire it back up and see if I can figure out why that mail account is so slow when I log on. It's not just from this computer that I get the lag- it happens from any computer anywhere in the world specific to my mail account. And nobody else who uses the same mail interface has the issue. Odd. Wireshark downloaded, installed and ran perfectly on WinXP Pro SP3. And it's free! Thanks!
A sniffer is what I was looking for. There are firewalls which will tell you who's knocking and let you see in and out traffic; that's why I started with "Firewall..."