Do I have a security problem?

[ddan]

Greetings,

My modem seems to be very busy the last couple weeks, but there doesn't seem to be a reason for it. I have DSL2. I have all my email under a virtural machine(vmplayer) I can disconnect the VM from the internet and still the modem is acitve. If I disconnect the host the modem the activity stops. So I know the activity is coming from the host. If I power off the modem for 10 minutes and power up again the activity starts again. If I power the modem off for the night, there is no activity in morning. But after an hour or two the activity starts again. Is there any way to find out where the activity is coming from? What should I check for?

I'm running Fedora 16 with all patches.

ddan

[sea]

Either a modem (example: dial up with 54k, analog or isdn) or a modern router (dsl, cable) has always activity.
They 'talk' things like:

Your modem: Hey i'm here and my MAC (hardware adress) is XY, but internaly my name is 192.168.x.x.
Internet: Got you, your MAC and name is. ...

Are there any working at your location?
By working i mean, anything that is worked on near you, wether that may be on the street, or the wired up in the air.
Or are you living in a older house/apartment (pre 1970)

This may cause weaker signals, which will increase packet trafic, which will be visible by more lights flashing.

EDIT
Dont know if that helps, but you could run one of these commands to see if there are any unkown sessions:
users (note, each terminal shows as a new user! So if you have 20 terminals open, you'll see yourname 20 times. If one of them is loged as root, root will be shown instead of your name)
top -u 0 (to list process ran by root)
top -u 500|1000 (to list process ran by default user 500 for f15 and below, 1000 for f16 and up)

[ddan]

Sea yes one light flashes which is just general internet activity in my area. But the light I worried about only flashes with traffic in/out of my computer.

ddan

[sea]

Just edited post above with some commands.
I'm sure there are more commands availble to figure it out, but i'm not aware of them.

[ddan]

Thanks sea, I'll take a look.

ddan