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Monitoring Bandwidth Across Multiple Systems in a Home Network

Monitoring Bandwidth Across Multiple Systems in a Home Network

For the past several years, I have been using a simple software bandwidth monitor on my computer to keep track of my monthly bandwidth usage. It has worked fine (more or less; the numbers are slightly off from my ISP’s online tracker).

Asked by: Guest | Views: 423
Total answers/comments: 2
Guest [Entry]

"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."
Guest [Entry]

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.