Continuous High Network Traffic

[Pippydigg]

Hi, I hope this is the right place to post, although I am also new to Freenas - I have a HP Proliant 40L running Freenas for a couple of weeks now and up until today everything has been going smoothly. Today I noticed my internet connection was in constant use (just from noticing activity light on router) so checked around and saw the the activity on the HP box was also constant even though I was doing nothing of note. Even when I shut the box down the activity continued on both the router and HP (I guess it still does things in standby).
Anyway after a reboot I ran 'systat -ifstat 1' and from what I can see there is a constant throughput of traffic, after less than an hour I've already churned through 2gb. Is there any reason for this, or things I can do to check what/why this is happening?

Im on the latest version and have installed all updates

 

[jgreco]

Try tcpdump to see what the packets contain, or netstat to see what sessions are established, and sockstat will tell you which process is associated with a session.

Not clear how the standby thing gets integrated into the puzzle.

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm not sure how reliable network usage indicators are since mine are running all the time, even for very small packets of data.

Are you getting hit by some malware or virus attack? There are a lot of things which can cause this and until we know all the networked items and their specs, I don't know how much help someone could give you. As you indicated above, even with FreeNAS turned off the network activity continues, as as I said before, this is just a network in use indicator which is great for troubleshooting connection issues, that is about it. I doubt this is a FreeNAS issue but you stated you had 2gb of traffic, was that in or out or combined?

So to help you troubleshoot, desconnect (unplug the network cable or turn off) every device on your network except the internet connection and your FreeNAS. Is the problem still there? If no, then one of your devices is likely reading all the files on your NAS, maybe a movie server? Just food for thought.

 

[Pippydigg]

So I did unplug all devices except the NAS and it continued, and somewhat baffling even tho I had disabled the plex plugin once I ran an update on it (it was a minor release) the traffic completely stopped. I checked and overall I downloaded 15GB yesterday but I have no idea what happened. I will keep an eye, but thanks for the replies