Bandwidth monitoring summary

[Darrell Burkey]

> On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Darrell Burkey wrote:
> > Unfortunately, I'm
> > not as interested in monitoring flow as I am in capturing the volume
over a
> > period of time such as ipac does.
>
> If that's *all* you want, then you can just use iptables (or ipchains).
> They both keep a count of the number of packets/bytes that match each
> rule.   I have no experience with any of the other packages suggested to

Yes and thanks for the scripts. I read through them and it all makes sense.
I do want a bit more in that I use ipac to generate graphs for a client and
my home network that both have direct connections and therefore are charged
by the meg, so we watch things carefully. For the client (a community
non-profit group) it's great because the can see by the day/week/month
exactly what workstations are using bandwidth nicely graphed on a web page.
For me, I feed the info into a script that limits my son's usuage to
something that still allows me to buy food and sometimes pay rent. :-)

It turns out that my problem with ipac/ipchains/kernel 2.4 was easy to fix.
I mentioned that the combination worked until I activated my ipchains based
firewall so off I went to have a good look at that. I had the command to set
the ipac rules at the end of the firewall script and it appears that this
caused the rules to miss the packets as they went through other chains????
This does make sense ot me but oddly enough it worked just fine this way for
almost a year until recent upgades of the kernel, ipchains and ipac.

Moving the ipac rules to the head of the script appears to be working but
I'm not sure how well. It seems to be counting a lot more traffic than I
would expect.

> you, as I have never needed more than ipchains (and one of these days I'll
> switch to iptables, but what I have works, so why try to break it?)

Agreed. But at least the whole event gave me an excuse to read up on and
install mrtg and snmp which should come in handy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Darrell Burkey @ Home
Canberra, ACT