Advise needed for tracking my internet volume

[photofinishron]

I am looking for a way to track my internet megabit volume up and down.

I've already tried through my ISP provider and they don't log anything.

I'm thinking of switching my ISP to verizon but they limit you to 50 megabytes per month. Crappy of them to do that Years ago they had an unlimited access plan but dropped it.

So what I need is a way to log my own internet usage

I'm using a linksys BEFSX41 Router right now and have the log provision turned on and their logfile viewer software installed on my W2K machine. But it doesn't log the bytes used.

Any Ideas???

Thanks

Ron

[theNbomr]

If all traffic funnels through a Linux host at some point, then the logging capability of iptables can be used. In fact I have been doing so for the very reason that you cite for several years.
Essentially, I take advantage of iptables byte and packet logging. A cron job that runs every minute:

0-59 * * * * /sbin/iptables -vnxZ -L | perl -e '@in=<>; foreach $rule ( @in ){ if( $rule =~ m/ACCEPT/ ){ @rule=split /\s+/, $rule; $bytes += $rule[2];}}$t=scalar localtime(time); $t =~ m/[A-z][a-z][a-z] (.+)/; print "$1 ", time, " $bytes\n";' >> /var/log/iptablesStats.log

You would have to have at least enough rules in your host that all traffic would be logged. I haven't added anything special to do logging, merely using the firewall rules.
The log file is parsed, plotted, and summary data printed by a web application on demand. logrotate rotates the log file weekly. The logs do not distinguish between data sent vs. received.

--- rod.

[photofinishron]

Thanks, I found out my linux boxes woudl track the usage but using too much to bother with verizon. Man these limited usage contracts are pretty much pointless.