[vox-tech] Measure network usage?

[Shawn P. Neugebauer]

On Saturday 28 June 2003 01:50 am, Samuel Merritt wrote:
> Shawn P. Neugebauer said:
> > I have a few Linux boxes that have uptimes of days to months.  I need
> > to try to estimate bandwidth usage for a long-ish period of time (e.g.,
> > days or weeks) in order to characterize how much bandwidth I use
> > (to decide on level-of-service issues for a new ISP---I have to move :(
> > ) .   Is there a way to tell the amount (in bytes) of traffic sent and
> > received by a running box?  Is there a simple *non-intrusive* tool that
> > might "add a little value" to whatever is built-in?  I'm aware of MRTG,
> > and Orca, but these are overkill for this type of problem.
>
> Take a look at the output of /sbin/ifconfig. It should have a line like
> RX bytes:2328595615 (2.1 GiB)  TX bytes:3104087047 (2.8 GiB)
> or so. Have a script dump the byte counts to a text file once an hour, and
> then you can do a little simple analysis with a hand-rolled tool.

That was the first place I checked, but <slapping hand on forehead>
I saw RX/TX packets and missed the byte count.  I just man'd ifconfig,
noticed it used /proc/net/dev, saw byte counts in *there* and started
wondering why they didn't show up with ifconfig...

Now, if I can extract some info from my router, I might have some idea how
much data exits and arrives at my network...

Thanks.