[olug] Bandwidth Metering

[Christopher Cashell]

At Mon, 05 Jun 06, Unidentified Flying Banana Charles Bird, said:
> anyone know of a good method of measuring bandwidth usage per IP
> within a given time frame?

What exactly do you mean by "bandwidth usage per IP"?  Are you wanting
to measure bandwidth for multiple IP addresses assigned to a single
device/interface?  Or are you wanting to measure bandwidth for multiple
IP addresses on a network, to determine how much bandwidth each host is
consuming?

Also, where/how are you planning on measuring this?  You mention a
linux router below, does that mean that all of your traffic is going to
be routed through a Linux box?

> Wondering who has done this and if there are recommendations from whomever.
> I am assuming this would be a lil linux router task. 
> I am not looking to shape or limit, just monitor usage per IP.

Without knowing more about what you want to track, I'd start with ntop.
ntop will pull a *lot* of additional information about your network than
just bandwidth use, but it may still provide the information you're
looking for.

If you're wanting to track multiple hosts and they're all being routed
through a linux box, there's multiple lighter-weight options than ntop,
also.  Heck, you could just add some iptables rules to catch traffic
from the hosts you're interested in, then watch their hit-counts (or pull
the hit-counts regularly and dump into a round robin database (RRD).

If you're looking at something more interactive, or short term, there's
also a couple of real-time bandwidth monitors.

-- 
| Christopher
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| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
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