Today's article is a nice simple article, where you get to monitor your bandwidth...

[KGIII]

For most folks, this isn't going to be something as a necessary tool. I could see it being useful for those who are curious and maybe those who have an edge server that's not behind an appliance that provides nice shiny report widgets.

There are of course other uses...

But, if you've ever wanted to monitor your bandwidth in real time, and you've wanted to do so with a very light and simple program, there's a solution!

Monitor Bandwidth In Real Time • Linux Tips

Today we're going to have a fun article, an easy enough article, where we simply talk about one way to monitor bandwidth in real time.

linux-tips.us

I didn't test this outside of distros in the Debian family (Lubuntu and Mint), largely due to time constraints. So, if cbm is (as I suspect) available easily on other distros, you should let me know - or perhaps leave a comment at the linked article.

Side note: The site's being hammered on with all sorts of traffic. In the past few days I've put many hours into tweaking the site so you should notice some very impressive page load times. This took me quite a few hours. It was not fun.

But, the site should be really speedy even though I'll easily have over 1000 individual visitors today. (Once upon a time, I was stoked when I had 20 visitors per day.)

 

[APTI]

I did not try it on Fedora but it looks like it will work fine since you compile on the system to run on.

I find myself wanting bandwidth monitoring frequently but what I would like to find is something that can be installed on one computer on the network and monitor ALL network activity from all stations and show how much each is using in real time and statistically. Many of my clients opted for cheap routers or phone company supplied routers so there are no fancy features in the routers like a Juniper or Cisco. Any ideas there?

 

[KGIII]

I find myself wanting bandwidth monitoring frequently but what I would like to find is something that can be installed on one computer on the network and monitor ALL network activity from all stations and show how much each is using in real time and statistically.

Hmm... That could be done with some client installed on individual computers that reported home to a central computer - or maybe done at the edge, if you have a router that they're going through. Fancy routers, even old Juniper (we switched from Cisco fairly early on) hardware had that capability. You could even drill down to see the bandwidth used by a specific workstation.

And, yeah, anyone should be able to compile it. I'm not sure which distros have it as a default, thanks!

 

[APTI]

Hmm... That could be done with some client installed on individual computers that reported home to a central computer - or maybe done at the edge, if you have a router that they're going through. Fancy routers, even old Juniper (we switched from Cisco fairly early on) hardware had that capability. You could even drill down to see the bandwidth used by a specific workstation.

And, yeah, anyone should be able to compile it. I'm not sure which distros have it as a default, thanks!

see that is the issue, I do not want a client on each station. It would miss reporting on stations that have no client installed. Was hoping for something that may use packet sniffing for it. If you find something in your travels, let me know

 

[KGIII]

Was hoping for something that may use packet sniffing for it.

Huh... That's conceptually interesting. I've never seen anything of the sort and I'm not sure how well it'd even work. And, yeah, the way I envision this working would require a client installed (and running) on all endpoints. I'd expect that it could just be a lightweight daemon as monitoring bandwidth is a mostly-solved problem.

I'll definitely let you know if I find anything. That's something I'd test myself and use as an article.

 

[BigBadBeef]

You know, a very large percentage of all the utilities you've described and prescribed in your articles can be substituted by a single tool in the gnome desktop environment variants - VITALS.

Using that, it turns a complex series of console commands that you recommended, into simple one or two click solutions in an easy to understand GUI interface.

 

[KGIII]

You know, a very large percentage of all the utilities you've described and prescribed in your articles can be substituted by a single tool in the gnome desktop environment variants - VITALS.

There's a GUI tool for pretty much everything - which is good for those that prefer a GUI (or have access to a GUI). There are far more Linux systems without a GUI than there are with a GUI.

 

[osprey]

There's a GUI tool for pretty much everything - which is good for those that prefer a GUI (or have access to a GUI). There are far more Linux systems without a GUI than there are with a GUI.

Yes, and the facility of the pipe to use and manipulate output with other command line tools, virtually endlessly, is not really available in the GUI. Then there's the capacity for scripting with the command line tools.

 

[KGIII]

Yes, and the facility of the pipe to use and manipulate output with other command line tools, virtually endlessly, is not really available in the GUI. Then there's the capacity for scripting with the command line tools.

I think those with only desktop Linux usage overlook all those things. They wonder why do it in the terminal when you can just use a GUI. Desktop Linux kind of abstracts all those things away, at least well enough for an average user to never even need the terminal - until they do. That's when they're lost.

 

[APTI]

Many developers make use of terminal commands with a GUI. I have a project I did that is still evolving which allows you to type (in the future to speak) commands in a fairly human way and have them execute on any computer you have on your network including over internet. It makes use of terminal commands to accomplish the tasks. It allows me to update computers without interrupting a user without being there. Do things like shut down computers or reboot them. Send commands to a select group of systems and control many things.
Girlfriend asked if I could do it in windows too, but windows lacks the ability in the CLI that linux has.

Bottom line is that eventually all terminal commands will have a GUI for them.