Arch Linux

ganja_guru

Member

Registered: 2005-02-14

Posts: 464

best bandwidth usage monitor

im using a 512kbps line which has a download/upload limit of 2GB/month (shitty, i know) 

anyway i want to know whats the best tool to monitor the amount i download/upload... i dont need anything complex..just something that starts up with kde and can monitor in the background and save usage statistics to a file for reference at the end of the month..i tried ethereal a while back and couldnt figure it out..is that the only prog available?

thanks in advance

Cam

Member

From: Brisbane, Aus

Registered: 2004-12-21

Posts: 658

Website

Re: best bandwidth usage monitor

If you wanted some eye candy maybe you could use a desklet that monitors your connection but hack it a little to  write to a file to keep track, maybe display that too. I've never used ethereal so I can't help ya there sorry

---

DON'T CLICK THIS

cactus

Taco Eater

From: t͈̫̹ͨa͖͕͎̱͈ͨ͆ć̥̖̝o̫̫̼s͈̭̱̞͍̃!̰

Registered: 2004-05-25

Posts: 4,622

Website

Re: best bandwidth usage monitor

ethereal is a packet sniffer. I use it for capturing packets for protocol analysis. Not sure why you would be trying to use that to monitor your bandwidth usage though.

You might try setting up iptables with a passthrough rule. Then you can snag the counter off that table.

Be careful though, as the counter resets itself at boot (if I remember correctly) and rolls over at some really high number. You could probably setup a cron script to snag the value every 5 minutes or so, and do some number crunching, and write out the difference since the last read to a text file.

I am sure there has to be some utility out there that will do it more easily though. Hopefully someone else knows.

---

"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos" -- Cactus' Law
"t̥͍͎̪̪͗a̴̻̩͈͚ͨc̠o̩̙͈ͫͅs͙͎̙͊ ͔͇̫̜t͎̳̀a̜̞̗ͩc̗͍͚o̲̯̿s̖̣̤̙͌ ̖̜̈ț̰̫͓ạ̪͖̳c̲͎͕̰̯̃̈o͉ͅs̪ͪ ̜̻̖̜͕" -- -̖͚̫̙̓-̺̠͇ͤ̃ ̜̪̜ͯZ͔̗̭̞ͪA̝͈̙͖̩L͉̠̺͓G̙̞̦͖O̳̗͍

Vinny

Member

From: the fifth floor

Registered: 2005-04-25

Posts: 29

Re: best bandwidth usage monitor

GKrellM can do this. The 'Net' builtin reads info from /proc and writes it to a file in ~/.gkrellm2.
When you mouse-over the eth0 part a button appears ; click it and you get a window with transfer stats sorted by day,week, and month.
Here's what it looks like:  gkrellm-screenshot

:-)