Arch Linux

mongo

Member

Registered: 2008-09-23

Posts: 3

Calculating internet usage

Hi all. Just wondering what all you Arch people recommend to keep a running total of internet usage. I'm in a shared house and want to make sure I don't use too much bandwidth since my housemate pays for it

I'm using darkstat at the moment which works well but I want more features. It only has a web interface and I'd like something which can be easily included in my .conkyrc. I'm thinking a /proc interface maybe for live stats and some cron jobs and startup/shutdown scripts to store data between sessions in addition to a web interface or gui frontend to show graphs in pretty colours. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get hour/day/week/month graphs or at least figures and keep a history for a few months.

Any ideas?

anrxc

Member

From: Croatia

Registered: 2008-03-22

Posts: 834

Website

Re: Calculating internet usage

vnstat for simplicity http://humdi.net/vnstat/
ntop for everything from pretty colors to making coffee http://www.ntop.org/overview.html

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You need to install an RTFM interface.

Tenken

Member

Registered: 2008-02-01

Posts: 126

Re: Calculating internet usage

If you want something that stays on the desktop you can use conky, it can display total amount uploaded and downloaded, and well as current upload/download usage.

SkonesMickLoud

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: The D of C

Registered: 2008-09-20

Posts: 178

Re: Calculating internet usage

+1 for vnstat & conky.

mongo

Member

Registered: 2008-09-23

Posts: 3

Re: Calculating internet usage

vnstat looks really good but it says that it's not a packet sniffer. I don't want to count local traffic - file transfers, playing music from another PC in the house, etc. I should have mentioned that in my first post. Anyway, as I understand it, I need minimal packet sniffing to achieve this. With darkstat I have a simple rule to exclude traffic where the source and destination IP are both on the local network.

I briefly tried ntop already but it was too much of a CPU hog and it's overkill for what I'm trying to do. Then again, maybe I just didn't configure it properly. I'll have another look.