Constant Networking Access

[divery4eyes]

Hi guys, I have a question that maybe some one here can answer.

I have six machines at home. Two wireless, four on a Linksys switch.
All of these feed off of a Linksys router which is in turn hooked up to a cable modem.
Looking at the switch, there seems to be constant activity.
Yes i know that the client has to send back data, but this is constant.
It is almost as if there is someone accessing the pc.
I have installed Network Magic on the bedroom computer and it tells me whenever one of my neighbors gets on my internet.
There seems to be no other intruders.
All windumb computers run AVG and Malwarebytes, the other two are Notfred.

I dont know that much about networking, so I have asked the local network admin who runs the school districts network and he was clueless.
Does anybody here know?

[toTOW]

You might try to capture the data packets with Ethereal to know where they come from, where they go, and what protocol they are ...

[P5-133XL]

First suggestion: Turn off all the folding on the machines attached to the switch, does that stop the switch activity? I suspect not. Folding only accesses the outside network when getting and sending WU's (not all the time).

Next, observe the specific lights on the switch: It should be indicating which machines/ports are having activity, not merely that there is activity somewhere on the switch. If you are talking about the switch portion of Linksys router, look at the lights where the plugs are because they will blink when there is activity on that indivdual port. Also, almost all network cards on your PC's will blink when there is network activity using that specific PC. You can also go to each PC's task magager (ctrl-Alt-Del then choose task manager) and on the networking tab, it will have a graph showing network traffic for that machine that you can configure to show bytes sent/recieved by going to view->columns.

Hopefully, that will give you some tools to try to pin the problem down.

[divery4eyes]

Thanks guys. Another question for you.
Of the four that are wired, two are notfred, and one of those is a single core. Now lately the single core has almost constant network access. Using Wireshark, I see the router constantly asking who is on this IP address, the pc responds back with the ?MAC address?
The router then goes through all available IP addresses and starts back over again. It just seems that this one pc(single core, running Notfred) gets, dare I say hammered all day long. Is there any way to correct this? Would limiting the number of IP addresses, available in the router help any?

By the way, Newegg has a 8800GTS for 79.99, that is a good deal right? If so, I am getting it when payday comes

[bruce]

When you downloaded notfred, did you specify an IP address or do all of your clients use DHCP? You might have conflicting IP addresses on your LAN.