Log Xfinity (Comcast) Router: Monitoring Internet Usage and Visited Sites

To monitor internet usage and possibly the sites visited by a 15-year-old grandson who is being raised with a notebook, you can use a log router. Here's a detailed guide on how to set it up:

Introduction

A log router is a software or hardware device that records internet activity, including the websites visited, the duration of the visit, and the time of access. This guide will focus on setting up a log router on a Windows-based system using a free, open-source software called Wireshark.

Requirements

• A Windows-based computer with Wireshark installed
• A network adapter compatible with Wireshark
• Basic knowledge of networking and TCP/IP

Instructions

1. Install Wireshark

   Download the latest version of Wireshark from official website and follow the installation instructions.

2. Configure Wireshark

   Open Wireshark and click on "Interface List" on the top menu. Select the network adapter you want to monitor and click on "Start".

3. Filter Captured Packets

   In the main Wireshark window, click on the "Filter" button and enter the following filter: http. This will display only the HTTP traffic.

4. Analyze the Data

   Browse through the captured packets to see the websites visited. You can find the URL in the "HTTP" section of each packet.

Tips

• To save the captured data for later analysis, click on "File" > "Save As" and choose a file format.
• You can use regular expressions to filter specific websites. For example, http.host contains facebook.com will display only the traffic to Facebook.

References

• Wireshark User Guide
• Wireshark Filters Cheat Sheet

Code Example

Below is a sample packet captured by Wireshark. The URL can be found in the "HTTP" section:

Frame 1: 67 bytes on wire (533 bits), 67 bytes captured (533 bits)
Ethernet II, Src: 00:0c:29:2e:9d:0a (00:0c:29:2e:9d:0a), Dst: 01:00:5e:00:0a:ac (01:00:5e:00:0a:ac)
Internet Protocol Version 4, Src: 192.168.1.101 (192.168.1.101), Dst: 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)
Transmission Control Protocol, Src Port: 53604 (53604), Dst Port: 80 (80), Seq: 1, Ack: 1, Len: 576
HTTP
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.82 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,vi;q=0.8
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1