Arch Linux

Raccoon1400

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2008-04-14

Posts: 853

Is bell making a mistake about my internet usage?

I checked my sympatico internet usage on the web.
It said we had dowloaded 6.22 GB, and we had gone over our 2GB limit.
The charge is 7.50 per additional GB, to a 30$ max. We reached the 30$ max.

One problem:
Neither dad or I can recall downloading that much. I don't think I could have done half of it, and he hasn't used his home computer much.
A few days after this billing period started, I checked the usage. It was about 3GB. With a 1 megabit per second connection, this would have been hard to do, an I hadn't downloaded anything big.
We don't use wireless, except my desktop computer can be used as a wireless router, but it has a password and hasn't been on enough for someone to be stealing our usage through wireless.

Is there a way to check the total internet usage arch has used this past month?
Is bell screwing me over?

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Fustrated Windows users have two options.
1. Resort to the throwing of computers out of windows.
2. Resort to the throwing of windows out of computers.

lungdart

Member

Registered: 2008-05-15

Posts: 27

Re: Is bell making a mistake about my internet usage?

I know if you have the firestarter program installed it will show you usage on your different interfaces.

Although I think it resets everytime your network connection is reset.

peets

Member

From: Montreal

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 936

Website

Re: Is bell making a mistake about my internet usage?

the file /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/rx_bytes contains how many bytes I've downloaded since I've booted linux. It might be the same on your system if you use the eth0 interface.

If your computer is always on, you could take the difference between end-of-billing-period bytes and beginning-of-billing-period to find how many bytes you downloaded in that month.

If you shut down your computer often, you could write yourself a shutdown script that saves the amount of bytes to some file, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
cp /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/rx_bytes ~/internet_usage/$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M)
poweroff

Last edited by peets (2008-05-17 16:48:11)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Is bell making a mistake about my internet usage?

Try vnstat.

Raccoon1400

Member

From: Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2008-04-14

Posts: 853

Re: Is bell making a mistake about my internet usage?

Try vnstat.

This looks like it might help.

---

Fustrated Windows users have two options.
1. Resort to the throwing of computers out of windows.
2. Resort to the throwing of windows out of computers.