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I would like to monitor the requests from my home network to see which (and how often) specific sites are visited. How would I go about doing that?

Update: I have signed up for OpenDNS. It was a very easy process. However, the reporting/statistics feature is not as "full featured" as I was expecting. I am not able to determine how much time a user has spent on a particular website. Basically, I am not able to get as detailed as I would like to. Is there another solution that provides more detailed reporting?

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Unfortunately OpenDNS can't tell you how long a user is visiting a site because it will often only receive requests occasionally when a page is visited. If you want real reporting, you'll need software which is always on running on a computer in your network. (Sadly, I don't know a piece of software that will do this off the top of my head.) – Michael Mior Jul 11 '10 at 21:01
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Create a free account on the OpenDNS.com site. They have a great tutorial on setting up your router to use the service. Once you start monitoring site visits you may wish to use their dashboard to filter out undesirable destinations. They maintain a list of malicious sites that are used by virus/trojan software. These site are prevented by default.

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up vote 1 down vote

While the OpenDNS route is a nice one, you could just as easily open up a Wireshark capture on the local network.

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This assumes the OP has the ability to configure a monitor port on his/her router or is using a hub or other device that will permit promiscuously acquiring packets. – Jed Daniels Jul 6 '10 at 18:11
What is Wireshark? – Andrew Jul 11 '10 at 19:03
@misb: Click the link... – Josh K Jul 11 '10 at 21:16
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up vote 1 down vote

I've been using OpenDNS for a while, and it is great. I recently replaced my wifi router firewall with the Astaro gateway (http://www.astaro.com/). I am using the free version which seems incredibly feature rich (for free). Provides proxy for http & downloads. Can show http requests by hosts. Even provides VPN. It was pretty straightforward to setup, and compliments OpenDNS nicely.

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