PPPoE ADSL "leaking" under 10.2.4

M

macraptor

Registered
I'm in Australia, on the Telstra BigPond network. I have run ADSL shared over Airport for the past two years without any problems (not true, really - Telstra has had more down-time than my old PB5300).

Typical downloads for 18 months was 20 Mb per day. Recently, this escalated massively for no reason. On checking my huge "excess usage" bill last monthI found that with NO overt internet programs running, Telstra is registering 1 - 7 Mb per HOUR (measured by "Launch! usage meter") of downloads and billing me for it. I can find NO reason for the usage.

I include the details for anyone interested below, but my questions are these:

Has anyone else noticed this "download leakage"?

Does anyone have any idea what could be doing the chatting over the PPPoE Airport connection (?10.2.4, ?Jaguar, ?iCal, ?iSync)?

Does anyone know of any program around that I could use to track down the origins and content of the throughput?

It is particularly frustrating, as this "leakage" now exceeds my 3 Gb per month use limit, and extra throughput is billed at $A140 / Gb after.

***************

Extra details

Until Jaguar, average monthly downloads were 500 - 800 Mb per month, despite me being an avid Versiontracker surfer/downloader.

Jaguar installed, and internet traffic went up 50%. No problems, still within the 3 Gb download limit. January 5, download volume kicked up to 50 Mb per day minimum. Then since Feb, it went up to 100 Mb per day, still no reason.

Since late Feb, it jumped again to 200 Mb per day. I turned off all known internet apps on all computers on the network, and still the throughput/downloads plug on at 1 - 7 Mb per hour, nearly 150Mb per day.

If I turn off ALL Airport cards in ALL Macs communicating via Airport, the leakage stops.

If I hold shift down after login (stopping all startup processes), the problem seems to reduce to under 2 Mb/hr.
 
i have to ask the obvious - are you behind a firewall? have you checked for viruses? if you answered no to either of these questions you could be getting 'hijacked'.

of course another way to get hijacked is to use one of those darn file sharing apps that lets others 'borrow' off your bandwidth with your permission. not that they specifically ask you for it, but you can disable it.
 
Yes and Yes.

Most embarrassed, however. I may have found the cause. Nothing too strange . Meteorologist was installed on all 3 machines, with a set of 20 cities, each with 15 min updates of 7 days of forecasts, each of 10 or so data points.

That's 3 x 20 x 96 x 8 x 10 = 460,800 data points per day, with lots of handshaking, and probably a few dozen bytes per data point.

It still seems short of the leak of 100 Mb per day, though.

I've turned off Meteorologist on all machines and I'll see where the graph goes.
 
$140/GB!:eek:

You can use tcpdump in the Terminal.app to monitor your connection.

sudo tcpdump -i interface
I'm not sure what the interface for the Airport card is, but for example the default ethernet interface is en0, and dial up modem is ppp0.

You need your admin password when the terminal asks you for it.

Try running this when you believe you have all programs closed on all your computers and see if anything is being sent over the network.

There will be the occasional packet sent over your local network, but that is normal. You want to look for a lot of activity.
 
You need this fantastic little application called little snitch it will inform you of any outbound connection attempts from your computer and it will allow you to setup rules ot block them if you want.

Starbuck

You can find it on versiontracer.com
 
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