monitoring lan clients bandwith usage

[xyzt]

Hello

I've a dsl modem running on linux. Is it possible to monitor lan
clients' bandwith usage via /proc or by a system call?

Thanks.

[coopstah13]

are you running a linux router?

[scathefire]

If you want a whole network look, or what to see say over time, I'd suggest using ntop

Welcome to ntop.org

[tolstoy]

Dirty solution is add iptables rul and see it counter
iptables -A INPUT -p ip -j ACCEPT
with
iptables -L INPUT -v
you can see your download
and zero counter with
iptables -Z INPUT

[lenfree84]

try mrtg...

[Kloschüssel]

I don't believe mrtg or iptables would be his option as it cannot give you information (at least not in this way) how much rx/tx has a lan client. iptables could work as you can create rules that match the ip addresses of the clients you want to monitor and then you can derive with the above way which client transferred what. But still you loose the information when it happened. So you cannot track down the usual behaviour of users. You would need to check for it in a regular basis and calculate diffs.

Here my idea: maybe there is a plugin for collectd?

Anyway. To see a realtime usage, which could be enough if you want to know why your DSL is so slow, ntop is your choice.

If you find a solution which integrates into openwrt/collectd or a snmp based tool that can run on a server within the network, let me know it!

[lenfree84]

how about using iftop or iptraf ?

[xyzt]

My only goal is not just getting statistics about the router but getting information about the per client usage.
I have little knowledge about the Linux Kernel and networking, sorry if I ask too weird questions. Is it possible to write a kernel module that collects information about per client (per Mac address) usage? It switches the packets to the clients, so it can count how many packets it switched to MAC1, MAC2, MAC3, etc...
Am I wrong?

[xyzt]

are you running a linux router?

yes, I use a linux dsl router.

[Kloschüssel]

start it a start here:

google "collectd plugin IPTables"

collectd DOT org/wiki/index.php/Plugin:IPTables