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For the past several years, I have been using an old copy of DuMeter on my computer to keep track of my monthly bandwidth usage. It has worked fine—more or less; the numbers are off by a bit from my ISP’s online tracker.

I am trying to build a (Windows) computer for my mother now. It would be connected to my router, probably wirelessly.

Is there an easy way to monitor and log total bandwidth usage (ie from both systems)? Neither system is guaranteed to be on at any given time. That is, there won’t be a system that is always on, so I can’t build a gateway system.

Thanks.

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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 14 '09 at 18:11

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4 Answers

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If you aren't against buying hardware -- you could purchase a DD-WRT compatable router (Such as a Linksys WRT54GL) and install the Gargoyle Router firmware which can do per-ip monitoring internally, and would not be reliant on any one PC being online and available. If you don't care about per-ip, DD-WRT or Tomato firmware can both do total usage, and even cap your usage for you so you dotn get overbilled.

If you have a SNMP enabled switch and a PC that is on all the time you could log bandwidth usage per switch port with something such as Cacti (or RRDTool)

If you have a spare PC around, IPTables as a router + RRDTool can provide bandwidth logs.

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No extra computers, but I would be open to a new router if it were inexpensive. I’ll take a look around to see if there are any deals on that router. – Synetech Aug 15 '09 at 12:47
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Router is probably Best:
What router? lots of home-level routers can do this. If you get WRT54GL (make sure to get the L version), you can install an alternate firmware such as DD-WRT which can log this. The router makes the most sense.

Could Use Mirror Port:
Another option would be to set up a mirror port on the switch portion and sniff the traffic with a tool such as ntop on one of the machines, this is probably more effort than it is worth.

Simplest:
I don't know dumeter, but maybe put it on both and just add them up at the end of the month? :-)

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My router is an older D-Link, so I don’t believe it has that (although it has other, more basic logging and stats functions). Actually, I had considered something like your add-it-up solution. I thought of having a script run on my mother’s machine that would periodically send the usage info to my system where it would add it to the total. I don’t mind cobbling together such a system, but I have my fingers crossed that there may be an existing solution. – Synetech Aug 15 '09 at 12:46
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Another solution is to build a Linux (or Linux/BSD based) router PC with two NICs to filter your traffic through. The bootable routers usually have tools available to graph your traffic usage along with good firewall configuration and some of them even do traffic throttling and QoS type functions.

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Thanks, but I can’t make a system that is always on (electricity isn’t cheap enough for that). – Synetech Aug 15 '09 at 12:43
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I assume that you are building a Windows machine, but if you consider Ubuntu, then you could use vnstat to keep track of bandwidth. I run it on my server and occasionally like to know what my bandwidth usage is.

It will display hourly, daily, weekly, monthly....and even monitor in real time.

Its CLI, but very, very easy to use.

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Yes, I am building a Windows system. Sorry. – Synetech Aug 15 '09 at 12:40
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