[wellylug] Traffic monitoring on home network

[Cliff Pratt]

Andrew Tarr wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I live in a big ol' house with lots (well, 6) people, some of whom I
> scarcely know.  We've just got a 20 GB broadband plan, and I'm
> wondering about how this is going to work out - what's to stop
> someone from downloading several movies in the first week, then
> everyone getting bitchy when everything reduces to something like
> dialup speeds, which is almost unusable if everyone's trying to use
> it?
> 
> So I'd like to at least monitor the traffic. It would be wonderful if
> I could also throttle traffic for people going over their share.
> I've had a bit of a look at the router's control webpage thing, and
> it doesn't look like it's capable of much of this sort of thing.
> It's a recent DLink wireless router of some kind (I think I bought it
> last year) I can't tell you exactly at the moment as I'm not at home.
> There is a separate ADSL modem.
> 
> I suppose throttling access will require setting up some sort of
> router, so firstly I'm interested in hearing about suitable hardware.
> This needn't be linux-based, if there's an off-the-shelf appliance of
> some kind I can buy, that would be great - I suppose this makes my
> post slightly off-topic, but I'm hoping I'll be forgiven.  I don't
> really want to spend very much on it, though, $300 would be an upper
> limit.  I was thinking perhaps something like this would come in
> handy:
> 
> http://docwiki.gumstix.org/Netstix
> 
> unfortunately they don't seem to be produced any longer. And even if
> they were still around, they only have one ethernet port.
> 
> Secondly, I'm also wondering whether I can monitor traffic from my
> own linux PC.  I'm imagining this won't necessarily be possible -
> won't the router act as a switch, and only be sending my computer
> packets its interested in? And if it is possible, then what will be
> the impact on network performance?  And what software do I use? I
> don't need anything too fancy, just an ongoing sum of useage per MAC
> address or something like that.
> 
> I've also had a fairly unfruitful search on the intertron, and on the
> wellylug mailing lists.  There's lots of stuff around, of course, but
> nothing that really seems to address my requirements, so I'm hoping
> that you guys can point me in the right direction.
> 
This is old, but may be useful :

http://www.cliffp.com/ipaccounting

Cheers,

Cliff