Re: Bandwidth monitoring

From: Robert Watson (rwatson_at_freebsd.org)
Date: 06/27/03

  • Next message: Julian Elischer: "Re: Bandwidth monitoring" 
    Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 18:44:55 -0400 (EDT)
To: Adam <blueeskimo@gmx.net>

    On 24 Jun 2003, Adam wrote:

    > My ISP is placing strict restrictions on how much I can transfer each
    > month, with high penalties for exceeding their limits. However, they
    > don't provide any way for their customer's to check to see how much
    > they've transferred, so we end up transferring far less than what we are
    > allowed, just to make sure we avoid paying the fines for going over the
    > limit.
    >
    > So, what I need to do is find a way to monitor my total bandwidth
    > through my external NIC. My gateway is running FreeBSD 4.8 with
    > ipf+ipnat.
    >
    > I *don't* need anything fancy. All I need is to be able to check at any
    > time how much I've transferred since the first of the month. What's the
    > easiest way to set up something like this? I know there are fancy
    > solutions with graphs with usage stats and such, but that's not what I'm
    > after.
    >
    > Thanks for your advice,

    I use the following home-grown tool to measure bandwidth consumed by
    the hosts on my ethernet segment:

       http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/bpfmon.tgz

    It uses BPF to monitor traffic on the segment, and drops bandwidth samples
    into a data directory every five minutes. there's a post-processing
    script that generates a CSV of samples, by local host, for easy
    consumption in a spread***. It's not a great program, but it is cute
    and works. Make sure to read the README if you use it; you have to set a
    few things at compile-time, since I wrote it for local use and never
    really attempted to generalize. I use it to monitor inbound and outbound
    IP traffic for around 400 hosts here for precisely the same reason you are
    interested :-).

    Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
    robert@fledge.watson.org Network Associates Laboratories

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