I'm interested in monitoring the internet traffic that goes in and out of my modem via wired and wireless connection. I need to be able to see the different computers that the traffic is coming from. Will microsoft network monitor do the trick? or do I need something more sinister?
What level of detail are you looking for? Are you looking to measure the amount of traffic or are you looking or deep details about traffic?
Pretty superficial stuff. Ideally real-time measure of traffic and being able to see the different IPs it is coming from. Would the backtrack linux distro have the tools to do it?
I use a free program called wireshark at work but I think that is overkill for what you are looking for. For windows I haven't used a program that fits your needs. For linux I dont know the backtrack distro but most linux distros have a program called netstat that is often useful.
Is it harder to use than netstat? It also looks like netstat is part of windows so i'll look into that.
wireshark isn't really harder but will provide way more information than I think you are looking for. It will show you EVERYTHING including packet and frame header information and the payload of every packet.
I use wireshark and jnettop at work. Wireshark is probably overkill for what you want to do, but if you want to analyze every single packet on your network wireshark is the way to go.