Introduction

LinkLogger is a great tool to let you see what traffic is (or is trying to) get in and out of your router. It works with several consumer-level routers.

While I had successfully used LinkLogger on my Win98 machine before I had a server, I encountered some problems getting LinkLogger to work with my Windows 2003 Small Business Server. I thought I'd post my solution to help some of you out that may be struggling with this like I did. I expect that what I've posted here will work equally well on 'regular' Windows Server 2003, but some of the screens may look a little different. I'm sorry I don't currently have access to a Win2K3 server to confirm differences. I'm a newbie at networking stuff, so I apologize if this seems really dumbed-down - I wrote it for my own level of understanding.

Assumptions

This describes my basic setup. You may need to make some minor changes to get things working for you, but hopefully this will give some hints. For what I've written to work 'as-is':

You have 2 NIC's in your server, and your server sits between your router and the rest of the computers on your network.
Your router is between your server and your cable modem, DSL, or whatever else you're using to connect to the internet.
You have a Linksys router (I'm using a BEFSR41 with the latest firmware)
Your router is not acting as a DHCP server. (In my case, my Win2k3 SBS server is the DHCP server for my network, as recommended by MS).
- It's excpeted that the IP's for the WAN and LAN NIC's in your server are static. The rest of the IP's on your LAN can be dynamic.
You're running NAT and the basic firewall on your WAN NIC only.

Summary

The quick list of things you need to do to get things working is:

Make sure that your router is sending the log information to the specific IP of the WAN NIC of your server. It won't work if you're doing a general broadcast on 192.168.1.255.
Make sure you allow UDP 162 to pass through to the WAN NIC on your network.
Make sure you've got the correct version of LinkLogger installed. (I was seeing my In/Out counts increase, but didn't see anything listed in the Traffic List. This is because I installed the "Protocol Logging" version of Link Logger, when I should have installed the non-"Protocol Logging" version.

Detailed Instructions

Here's more detailed instructions with pics:

Server Settings

Find the NAT/Firewall settings for your Server

Navigate to the RRAS settings for "NAT/Basic Firewall" in your Computer Management MMC snap-in.

On my server, my WAN NIC is called, "WAN Connection", and my LAN NIC is, "Server Local Area Connection".

WAN NIC Properties

Open the properties dialog for your WAN NIC connection, by right-clicking on the WAN interface, and selecting "Properties".

Allow UDP 162 to pass through your firewall

Select the "Services and Ports" tab on the Properties dialog for your WAN conection. Create a new Service, and call it, "SNMPTrap Messages". The Protocol needs to be UDP, and the Incoming and Outgoing ports need to be set to 162. The Private address needs to be the IP of your WAN NIC. *Correction: After further testing, it seems LinkLogger will work when this IP is set to your WAN or LAN IP. However, I'm guessing it's probably safer to set this to your WAN IP. (My previous instructions suggested using the LAN IP).

Check that the new service is enabled

Make sure your new 'Service' is enabled, and press [OK] to exit.

Setting up your Linksys Router

Set your WAN NIC's IP as the log info recipient

Before I had a server, I was using the recommended setting of 192.168.1.255 for the "Send Log to" property on the "Log" tab of the router's configuration utility. However, I found that with the server, I had to set this to the IP of my WAN NIC. Of course, the Access Log also needs to be enabled.

Setting up LinkLogger

Set the router's IP

Set the Router Address to the IP of your router. (I know the LinkLogger instructions already suggest this but since the Win2k3 server is acting as a router too, I wasn't too sure which IP to use).

Install the correct version of LinkLogger

I made the mistake of installing the "Protocol Logging" version of LinkLogger originally. I didn't get any error messages, but I didn't see anything in the Traffic List. I did see the In/Out traffic counters incrementing, but nothing in the Traffic List. As soon as I installed the non-"Protocol Logging" version, it worked great.

Done

That should be all you need for LinkLogger to work!