[ubuntu-za] ADSL Traffic

[Stefano Rivera]

Hi Bill (2010.02.01_11:47:57_+0200)
> Something is obviously chowing my bandwidth while I am not watching.
> It could be something on my 08.04 Ubuntu box, but of course it is just
> as likely to be one of the two XP machines or the one Vista machine
> that is the culprit.

Monitoring those is harder than linux. You can find programs that'll do
it for you, or you can put a Linux router between them and the Internet,
and do the counting there.

> But, starting at the beginning, is there a program that I can run on
> by 08.04 Ubuntu machine that I can use to see if there is anything
> behind the scenes who is downloading things while I am not watching?

My favourite program for this is vnstat. [1] It only looks at the
interface counters, so it doesn't use much RAM or CPU and can't tell you
what's causing the traffic. But it can tell you how much traffic a
machine moves.

If the machine is downloading too much, then you can investigate more
deeply, with iftop, bandwidthd, ntop, etc.

[1]: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/330

SR

-- 
Stefano Rivera
  http://tumbleweed.org.za/
  H: +27 21 465 6908 C: +27 72 419 8559  UCT: X4057