Keep Track of your HTTP Traffic

 Whenever you try to analyze the data and the pattern of

bandwidth usage in your network, you need to configure a data capturing software

between the proxy server and users. Sometimes it works as a sniffer, which can

make your network slow while running in a promiscuous mode. Charles Web Proxy

fixes up the problem by doing the job of a  proxy server and a data

capturing tool. Charles is an HTTP Proxy and Monitoring software that sits

between the Internet and the users and records all the traffic in every session

including requests, responses and the HTTP headers. 

It shows the traffic in Structure and Sequence formats. It

features DNS Spoofing, Reverse Proxy, Port forwarding and automatic updates

among other features. It can be configured to provide any TCP/IP or UDP port

forwarding. It is shareware and costs US $50 for a single user license. Lets see

how it works.

1	To add machines that will access the Internet, click on 'Proxy and Access Control Settings'. Now click on add button to enter the IP addresses or an IP subnet range	2	If an existing proxy needs to be used, select Proxy>External Proxy Settings, In the pop-up window choose the external proxy type and provide other details as required
3	To view the traffic in Website Structure format, click on the Structure tab at the bottom of the session window	4	When you open a website under Structure tab, you can see what all files and content has come from that site
5	To view the websites/URLs in the sequence users have accessed them, click on the Sequence tab. You can also filter these URLs	6	To see the details about any website or URL, select it and click on the General tab. Here you can see the details like page-size, host, download speed and latency
7	To see the details of the request that your browser sent to the webserver, click on the Request tab	8	To view the response to a request, click on the Response tab, if it has an image, you click on the Image tab to view it
9	The ASCII tab displays the content/output in pages (HTML, ASP, JSP, etc) accessed	10	For spoofing, click DNS spoofing from tools. Then, click Enabled and add the target hostname and address

Swapnil Arora