Creating an office network and monitoring all activity without a proxy

Posted by Robert on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Robert
Published on 2012-09-29T09:08:31Z Indexed on 2012/09/29 9:39 UTC
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We are setting up our office network and would like to track all the websites visited by our employees. However, we would not like to use any proxy based solutions.

Our work is highly dependent on applications in which you cannot configure a proxy. Hence, the approach we would like to follow is setting up a router inside a computer (something like this : http://www.techrepublic.com/article/configure-windows-server-2003-to-act-as-a-router/5844624)

This will also allow us to attach multiple ethernet cards and have redundancy in internet connectivity with complete abstraction from the user about which connection is being used.

But most importantly, since all the traffic will be going through the computer (configured as a router) I assume there will be a way to run packet analysis on all the request / responses being made. For example, list all the FTP servers connected to (port 21), give a graph of all the URLs visited per day by frequency.

Is there already a software which does this ? Or is it possible to build something like this ?

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