Bandwidth monitoring

[Julian Elischer]

I'm not sure I understand why not just tell ipfw to count all packets
that an ISP is likely to charge for and have the tables 'reaped every
now and then by a daemon to give a time dimension to the data..


On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Robert Watson wrote:

> 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 spreadsheet.  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 at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories
> 
> 
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