{"id":266,"date":"2008-07-03T14:31:10","date_gmt":"2008-07-03T13:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyberelk.net\/tim\/?p=266"},"modified":"2014-05-20T09:09:13","modified_gmt":"2014-05-20T08:09:13","slug":"monitoring-bandwidth-during-peak-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyberelk.net\/tim\/2008\/07\/03\/monitoring-bandwidth-during-peak-hours\/","title":{"rendered":"Monitoring bandwidth during peak hours"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many ISPs in Britain, mine allows me unlimited downloads during off-peak hours but has a monthly restriction on downloads during peak hours.\u00a0 Peak currently means 6pm until midnight, although next month it will be changing to 9am until 11pm.\u00a0 I thought it would be a good idea to monitor how close to my quota I am, to see if this will affect me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I found the vnstat<\/a> project, which is already packaged for Fedora, and this is almost exactly what I needed.\u00a0 After installing the package, I just needed to configure it:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Edit \/etc\/sysconfig\/vnstat<\/tt> to make sure the correct network interface is monitored.<\/li>\n
  2. Edit \/etc\/cron.d\/vnstat<\/tt> and uncomment the line that enables network interface monitoring (not sure why this comes commented out).<\/li>\n
  3. Edit \/etc\/vnstat.conf<\/tt> and check that everything looks right. I changed the locale, but I’m not sure why it doesn’t use the system locale.\u00a0 Maybe something to do with cron?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It works by gathering data from the proc filesystem and using it to update a simple database file each time it is run from cron.<\/p>\n

    The only missing piece was the ability to examine network usage during peak hours only.\u00a0 I’ve sent a patch for this to the maintainer, and put a small git repository here:<\/p>\n

    git clone https:\/\/cyberelk.net\/tim\/data\/vnstat.git<\/a><\/pre>\n
    If you’re reading this from the future and that link doesn’t work, hopefully it’s because the patch has been accepted…<\/p>\n
    I can now see my actual peak usage so far, as well as the estimated total for this month.\u00a0 Here’s an example of the output (not real data):<\/p>\n
     eth0  \/  monthly\r\n\r\n   month         rx      |      tx      |   total\r\n-------------------------+--------------+--------------------------------------\r\n  Jul '08       1.34 GB  |   103.00 MB  |     1.44 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%::\r\n   (peak)      32.57 MB  |     1.71 MB  |    34.28 MB\r\n-------------------------+--------------+--------------------------------------\r\n estimated     16.10 GB  |     1.21 GB  |    17.31 GB\r\n   (peak)        384 MB  |       12 MB  |      396 MB<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    Like many ISPs in Britain, mine allows me unlimited downloads during off-peak hours but has a monthly restriction on downloads during peak hours.\u00a0 Peak currently means 6pm until midnight, although next month it will be changing to 9am until 11pm.\u00a0 I thought it would be a good idea to monitor how close to my quota […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"yoast_head":"\nMonitoring bandwidth during peak hours - 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