Hi guys,

I'm using a Linux system(Ubuntu) and I've been trying to find a method to read the total packets received/sent on a specific port (e.g port 80 or port 25) on a local machine. I can read the overall total packets received/sent from the /proc/net/dev file system. But what I can't do is read packets received/sent from a specific port. I don't think there is any information about total packets on a specific port in any of the /proc file system. So, what is the best way to get this information?

I would like a way to do this so that I can display the activity on a specific port for my program I'm working on. Thanks

---------- Post updated at 02:46 AM ---------- Previous update was at 02:34 AM ----------

Okay, i've found out that I can use tcpdump to do this. This can be one of the many ways. I would prefer a different method where I do not need to install packet capture libraries like libpcap for my program to work. Besides, I need to have root privilege to use libpcap. Any other ideas?

The iptables firewall can be made to simply log activity rather than actually filtering but it would need to load modules as root.

Thanks for the reply, I will look into iptables