Help me find the log for Windows XP Pro's connection sharing

February 25, 2004 5:56 PM

I use the Windows XP Professional Internet Connection Sharing to dish out my DSL access to a couple of people residing in the same location. How do I find just basic log information about this service? It magically dishes out DHCP access to them, but I can't even find how many IP addresses have been assigned, how many connections are active, and so on.
posted by LukeyBoy to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Try 'netstat' at the command line. Play around with optional flags. Works on '98, anyway.
posted by trondant at 8:54 PM on February 25, 2004

or, if you want *really* detailed stats (like, every request that goes across your NIC), get Ethereal.
posted by Hackworth at 9:10 PM on February 25, 2004

Ethereal is overkill I think - I just want the basics (although using it also occured to me). Netstat fails to show any connections that this machine is bridging.

Under Linux/BSD/whatever flavor of Unix, there are a ton of log files, some of which show the details of DHCP leases that have been sent out. And the proc filesystem combined, iptables, etc. can show masqueraded connections. On this I can't even figure out if other people are jumping on the wireless LAN.
posted by LukeyBoy at 2:33 AM on February 26, 2004

So an update. Ethereal - or rather the underlying libpcap library - doesn't run on this system.

So I tried the ActivePorts utility. Like netstat, it shows everything I'm doing, but nothing from other users. It seems that all of the NAT functionality is a separate layer.
posted by LukeyBoy at 3:23 AM on February 26, 2004