Anyone travelling through Reading may have at some point seen the unsecured wireless network called NAMOS. Well thats me.

The Network isn’t totally insecure, the Access Points sit behind a Juniper NS5GT and all web / IM / mail is piped through a BlueCoat Security Appliance. I noticed that the client stats were increasing and I was wondering what people were doing with the system.

As indicated earlier a Firewall and Security appliance sits between the wireless and my Internet router, the Firewall only allows Web, IM and IMAP/POP3 through. So I was thinking what would these people would do if I let them do what they want. An investigation was called for!

So cue sticking NTOP on a spare machine and a quick mirrored port later means I can watch what happens. 24 hours later I had some interesting results.

Basic Traffic Breakdown:

Packet Size Breakdown:

Distance of Hosts

Network Throughput
Actual 681.8 Kbps
Last Minute 624.4 Kbps
Last 5 Minutes 644.0 Kbps
Peak 7.7 Mbps
Average 617.7 Kbps

So I think we can safely say that people like Torrents and Usenet.

A note on Privacy: The BlueCoat device displays a splash screen when a user first attempts to connect to a website and also inserts a message to both parties at the start of an IM conversation. So people knew that there was the possibility that what they were doing was going to be recorded.