LittleBrother is Watching

This is a very handy utility for companies that have trouble

controlling traffic on their network. LittleBrother sits on your network

monitoring and logging all activity on it. So, as a network administrator, you

can view logs of all the websites everyone’s visited on your network over a

particular period. The utility lets you rate the visited websites as being

unproductive, productive, neutral, or not rated. It also lets you change the

ratings for websites, and see which users are accessing which websites and for

how long.

The utility can be installed on a Win 9x, NT, or even a Win

2000 machine, and requires about 50 MB of hard drive space. You can also have a

client/server installation and monitor all activity from a remote client.

Placing LittleBrother on your network is a little tricky. First of all, it

should be on a machine that falls on the route to your Internet connection.

However, don’t install it on the same machine as your proxy server, as it won’t

show which machines and users on your network are accessing the Internet.

Instead, it will show everything as being accessed by the proxy-server machine.

If you are using a proxy server, then place LittleBrother somewhere before it.

Once LittleBrother is configured, you can get a variety of

information about your network’s usage. It can show you the top talkers on

your network, and give you reports on users and sites for the past hour, day,

week, or even month. Some of these reports include a list of the most productive

or unproductive users and sites, and the most frequently accessed sites. You can

also view the type of traffic that’s flowing most on your network and the

machines generating it. In the last part, you can monitor both IP and IPX

traffic flowing on your network.

Another neat feature of LittleBrother is that you can send

alerts to any e-mail you want. These include alerts for a user accessing the

Internet for very long periods of time, overnight usage, a new user, or a new

website being accessed. This way, as the administrator you don’t even have to

login to LittleBrother’s console to see what’s happening. These reports will

automatically be sent to users.

LittleBrother is also available in a Pro version, which let’s

you block particular users and websites. Pricing for LittleBrother Standard

starts at $295 for a 10-user license and LittleBrother Pro starts at $495. To

place an order, you need to send an e-mail to sales@littlebrother. com and

include the type, number and expiration date of your credit card. A shipping fee

will be added to all orders. Overall, it’s a very useful software for

monitoring and controlling traffic on your network.

Anil Chopra 



at PCQ Labs