Network Monitor Project Idea

[Jack Edge]

Hi, my name's Jack Edge, and I'm a Computer Science student at the
University of Southampton.

An idea which I believe Ubuntu would benefit from and one that I would
love to implement is the idea of a "Network Monitor", filling a gap I
perceive in the various monitoring tools that are supplied by default
with Ubuntu.

The System Monitor has various tabs describing memory and CPU in use by
individual processes and the system-in-general, but there is no such
information supplied from a networking perspective.

If the user wishes to find out quite what is using a large chunk of
bandwidth, and doesn't know what the source is, she has to turn to a
quite technical series of tools, from querying the TCP socket table
(possibly with proc) to examining packet movement with
tcpdump/wireshark.

Network Tools is rather too technical for a less savvy user, and still
will not trace the origin of a large use of bandwidth, or multiple open
connections, or a sudden cessation of network activity.

As such, I propose that a "Network Monitor" tool be created that
collects data from these technical sources, and tabulates them into a
visual form, and accompanying tabs.

As an extension, a Network Monitor daemon can be started on other
machines, and send network status data to a master machine, which could
allow observation of a large number of computers.

I would write this project using Python since this is by far my
strongest language, and the GTK toolkit.

Thanks for reading, I would love to hear any thoughts.
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