you could do a netstat on the local machine from a secure shell and it would show you what connections the user currently has established...

basically, you could make a simple program which uses netstat and logs all connections open on the local machine... you could even create some kinda web-based front end with graphs using LAMP... LOL...

if you only care about web traffic, and you wanna monitor your entire lan from a central location, you could install a transparent proxy server on the network (if you have control over the router) and instruct the proxy to log everything...

what to do if i dont want to use netstat...
can i not write my own program that creates these log files...actually it's a matter of success of my mini-project....
thanx in advance for giving idea of netstat...

the netstat thing was just an example...

yes, you can make your own program... you'll obviously need to know how to program first...

you need to pick a programming language that you like and then start studying it...

you probably wanna start by learning a high-level language such as python...

http://www.python.org/

and yes, python does tcp/ip...

=)

before you can go and write a network sniffer, you need to learn the sockets api. i suggest 'unix network programming' by W Richard Stevens. that will introduce you to raw sockets towards the end, and some googling will teach u the rest. (raw sockets are how u snoop on a network).

man u python people sure are pushy one of these days im going to have to read the python book i have and see what all the fuss is about

ah!.. now i feel somewhat releived that miniproject will be success.
but is it necessary to learn python..
thing is..i have already learnt c, c++, java, (lisp somewhat), Qt and now i start getting confused when i have to learn one more new language..
i cannot afford to learn some new language at this time because then i have to re-code other modules of the program in python too..
can u please let me know if this is possible using java preferable and if not using c++??
thanx in advance.

Yes, you can use Java or C++ to do TCP/IP programming.

what all do i need to learn in tcp/ip programming to do the program specified in above discussions..
will the functions vary according to the language or it is fixed for unix

I suggest you look at the source code for something that already does what you want and look at that. It's not really a simple feat and it really doesn't sound like you're quite as experienced a programmer as you lead on to be.

No, the sockets API calls are pretty much the same in all languages. They might be somewhat limited in high level languages (e.g. Java, because of the platform independence). I also recommend studying Stevens' "Unix Network Programming" because it explains all the low level stuff you need for your project.

Good luck!
bruce