I guess it's socket programming. But I have never done socket programming expect for running the tutorial examples while learning Python. I need some more ideas to implement this.

What I specifically need is to run a monitoring program of a server which will poll or listen to traffic being exchange from different IPs across different popular ports. For example, how do I get data received and sent through port 80 of 192.168.1.10 and 192.168.1.1 ( which is the gateway).

I checked out a number of ready made tools like MRTG, Bwmon, Ntop etc but since we are looking at doing some specific pattern studies, we need to do data capturing within the program.

Idea is to monitor some popular ports and do a study of network traffic across some periods and compare them with some other data.

We would like to figure a way to do all this with Python....