[CentOS] Outbound traffic spike every 30 minutes

Wed Dec 4 16:23:34 UTC 2013
Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at BUC.com>

On 12/4/2013 4:47 AM, Heiko Specht wrote:
> hi,
> i aggree with mark.
> maybe iftop -P would work for you...
> and if you can determine a port from iftop you could run lsof -Pn | grep :<Port> to list the daemon which uses this port.
>
> that is what i would try..
>
> Heiko
>
>>>> <m.roth at 5-cent.us> 03.12.2013 23:15 >>>
> Bowie Bailey wrote:
>> On 12/3/2013 4:49 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> Bowie Bailey wrote:
>>>> Since Sunday morning, one of my CentOS servers has been generating a
>>>> small spike of outbound traffic every 30 minutes (X:00 and X:30). It's
>>>> not enough traffic to really cause any notice except for the fact that
>>>> it is a very regular pattern and it started abruptly at midnight
>>>> Sunday.
>>>>
>>>> This server is used for mail (Courier-MTA), and DNS (Bind).  I cannot
>>>> find anything unusual in either of those logs.  I tried grepping
>>>> through my firewall logs, but have been unable to find anything useful
> there
>>>> either.  I don't see any cron jobs that would generate network traffic.
>>>>
>>>> Any suggestions how I can go about tracking this down?
>>> Run rkhunter?
>>>
>>> Actually, if it's that regular, you could run tcpdump when you expect
>>> it.
>> rkhunter complained about a few files, but "rpm --verify" doesn't flag
>> any of them.  Other than that, just a few insecure settings and out of
>> date programs, which are not ideal, but do not indicate a problem on
>> their own.
>>
>> I could try running tcpdump or wireshark, but that's going to generate a
>> lot of data and I'm not sure how to go about filtering it.  I know the
>> spike happens on the hour and half hour, but my traffic monitor does not
>> give me enough detail to see exactly when it starts or exactly how long
>> it lasts and I don't know what protocol or port I'm looking for.
>>
> Dumb idea: run top and see if something spikes.

iftop helped me track it down.  It was actually starting at :05 and 
:25.  One of my email clients received a 20M email and was having 
problems downloading it.  Every 30 minutes, the pop client would 
connect, try to download the emails, and then disconnect after 2 minutes.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

-- 
Bowie