Talk about misuse of resources – Finally sick of Winduhs woes I am using X over VNC, A switched network and powerful machines rock 
After experimenting with several Network monitoring tools have settled for Nagios for details and IPTraf for the quick and dirty work.
The efforts on configuring Nagios paid off when I could show my cable guy the outages in services in a graph and a table down to the seconds…
Laffin! You mean you are outshining your internet provider??
Nagios is really good. Its being used extensively here at Yahoo!