Something is downloading in background Linux

My laptop boots normally to LinuxMint and immediately I like to open gnome-system-monitor but the shock is that something is downloading (the problem has been out 2 days ago) and nothing I run yet!

I did iftop in terminal but nothing strange, also I tried nethogs which showed nothing at all.

The more complicated when I reboot and same problem is there so I can't browse/surf Internet, no one connected to my network can browse any more it's absorbing the stream horribly!

After many reboots it will go to normal state(no background downloading). But really I can't figure out the problem going behind the scenes!

Any help would be appreciated... thanks.

screenshot

Update: I've just figured out the problem. I noticed that when a laptop running windows 7 connected to my network is downloading mine also downloading just like I am a node it goes through, and when it is off my laptop back to normal state! Can anyone think why such problem could happen?

wisdom

Posted 2013-11-03T14:12:05.820

Reputation: 487

Maybe check netstat, iirc the -b flag tells you what binary is doing the data transfer. – Journeyman Geek – 2013-11-03T15:10:56.983

have you tried tcpdump ?I hope it might give you some clues. – Ashildr – 2013-11-03T16:14:55.010

tcpdump not yet...I'm reading about it,thanks – wisdom – 2013-11-03T20:41:40.943

1FYI @wisdom you don't need to put "solved" in the title - just mark an accepted answer (as you've done) and the question is automatically marked as having been answered successfully. – nhinkle – 2013-11-08T08:25:59.907

Answers

I guess I know what the problem, it's just ntop process auto-started in startup and I tried to kill it so everything goes back OK, I read some about ntop as it monitors the network USERS usage ! sorry, I'm totally new to such network techniques but it's very nice :)

wisdom

Posted 2013-11-03T14:12:05.820

Reputation: 487

In my case, it was the snap package manager that was auto-updating. How I knew that. I installed nethogs using the command sudo apt-get install nethogs. Then I get my machine network interface using the ifconfig, for me, it's a wlan interface, recently wl, since I'm using wifi. If you are using ethernet, then it will be eth, recently en. Now I run the command sudo nethogs interface, where interface will be replaced with your net interface, for example sudo nethogs wlp3s0, hit enter and you will get all the programs that is using this network interface.

Mouhammed Elshaaer

Posted 2013-11-03T14:12:05.820

Reputation: 101

You're on the right track. iftop will show you what addresses your system is communicating with. The next time this starts happening, launch it to see where the data is going, and in another window, launch netstat -tanp. This will show you all active connections by IP address, and the -p flag will show what process on your system is responsible for the socket.

You can then correlate the two together and go from there.

Mikey T.K.

Posted 2013-11-03T14:12:05.820

Reputation: 3 224

I'll give it a try, actually I did try something similar by checking port from iftop then try this command netstat -tpn | grep [prot] but as I mentioned before nothing active while it's downloading which will drive me crazy – wisdom – 2013-11-03T15:58:04.840