APT downloading without my consent

Question

I installed natty (11.04) and wanted to play a video. Went through the process the cancelled because it was slow and files were relatively large unstable and it was late .(Internet very expensive for me). I copied the links to download later.

i closed mplayer and went on surfing in Firefox. Surfing was not working properly. And i got an error using traceroute(something about a buffer).

In system monitor i noticed my connection was going at nearly its max speed (17KBps)

I checked netstat but i didn't show any thing that indicated which application was downloading.

Killed all open apps. Didn’t fix

I opened the software manager and it told me that another app was using apt. I didn’t find anyway to kill it so i had to restart.(My uptime is usually around a month) Problem fixed on restart.

#

What is the root cause of this issue?

Is there any app that can tell me what application is downloading what? Sorta like system monitor on windows or some firewalls on windows

Any per process firewalls for Linux like the type I’m using on windows (Comodo); Doesn’t have to be open source.

Answer 1

As royalsampler suggested above use nethogs for Realtime network usage viewing through terminal . Install it using

sudo apt-get install nethogs

and run it

sudo nethogs

For example you can see as here

NetHogs version 0.8.0

  PID USER     PROGRAM                      DEV        SENT      RECEIVED       
2652  user     /usr/lib/firefox/firefox     eth0       2.318      48.183 KB/sec

And for a GUI preferred interface use Firestarter , approximately 500 KB's download.

Answer 2

There's a tool called nethogs which will show the network usage by process http://nethogs.sourceforge.net/

Answer 3

To completely block apt from working, you need to block it from starting. Go to /usr/lib/apt, then open the methods folder as administrator. Rename http to http.bak. This will affect all applications that depend on apt.