Free bandwidth monitor software for linux

bandwidth monitor is a small application which polls /proc/net/dev for the byte counts for a given network device , and calculates the RX and TX bandwidths. Originally a shell script, then a Perl script, now rewritten in C so that it can easily be used on embedded devices like the Linksys WRT54G as well as.

This program started as a shell script that I ran on my home-brew firewall wireless router (Linux, of course, on a 486/66) to keep track of my incoming and outgoing bandwidth. This let me know that I was getting the bandwidth that I paid for, and it also helped me keep an eye on the throttling of bulk traffic so that I didnt choke out my interactive sessions. Of course, that was before I had QOS.

The program is probably tied to Linux, since it grabs the byte counts for the requested interface right from /proc/net/dev. It could pretty easily be modified to grab the same information from the output of /sbin/ifconfig, but that would waste resources to spawn a new process to parse the /proc/net/dev file and regurgitate it to us. Also, I havent bothered to look at how uniform the output of the byte counts from /sbin/ifconfig is on other operating systems.

As a side note, the C version also uses nanosleep() and gettimeofday() to get more accurate polling intervals and track the overall time (since sleep(), usleep(), nanosleep(), et. al. only guaruntee to wait at least as long as you request, but do not guaruntee that it wont be possibly much longer...) So, if you were interested in porting it, youd have to make sure that nanosleep() and gettimeofday() were also available, or lose the resolution of the time used in bandwidth calculations.

BUILDING

$ gcc -O3 -o bandwidth_monitor bandwidth_monitor.c

Linux Bandwidth Monitor (bwmon) is yet another utility that measures bandwidth utiliazation per interface basis. It is coded in C and takes advantage of POSIX thread and curses library. It runs only on Linux systems since the utility reads /proc/net/dev and /proc/uptime.

The utility reads /proc/net/dev and /proc/uptime files in order to print out bandwidth usage at user selected intervals, maximum bandwidth usage since initialization of the utility and average bandwidth usage since the last reboot. This is done based on network interface.

Tested on Linux 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.5.x, SuSE and RedHat distributions.
To compile, simply say
$ make
To install, say (optional)
# make install
Or copy bwmon binary where ever you want.

NAT Monitor is a tool to monitor hosts bandwidth usage in a Linux-NAT network.

A daemon collects data and clients display them (currently a GTK app with graph and a text version). It detects new hosts, saves up to 12 hours of data, and has a nice summary statistic.

okons bandwidth manager (aka. obwman) is a simple tool for efficient traffic shaping. okons bandwidth manager aims to give a fair share of bandwidth to each host while imposing particular rules.
Configuration of obwman is straightforward and it is almost maintenance free., as it detects automatically hosts on the network. Obwman prioritises traffic of HTTP, TCP ACK and TCP initiate session.
Main features:
- fair allocation of bandwidth
- enforce minimum and maximum speed
- support for aggregated links (uplink agnostic)
- automatic detection of hosts on the network
- support for Squid proxy
- free (available under GNU General Public License ).

WebCBQ Bandwidth Manager is written in PHP and iss a Web interface that let you create, edit and remove rules for cbq.init script.
It makes the network traffic management easy under Linux platform.
This interface lets a knowless user to manage the clients bandwidth.
Enhancements:
- Link identification on mouseOver
- Remove Help huge files
- Correct some English dictionary words
- CBQ.init configurations files examplesincluded

IP Bandwidth Watchdog (ipband) is a pcap based IP traffic monitor. It tallies per-subnet traffic and bandwidth usage and starts detailed logging if specified threshold for the specific subnet is exceeded. If traffic has been high for a certain period of time, the report for that subnet is generated which can be appended to a file or e-mailed. When bandwidth usage drops below the threshold, detailed logging for the subnet is stopped and memory is freed.

This utility could be handy in a limited bandwidth WAN environment (frame relay, ISDN etc. circuits) to pinpoint offending traffic source if certain links become saturated to the point where legitimate packets start getting dropped.

It also can be used to monitor internet connection when specifying the range of local ip addresses (to avoid firing reports about non-local networks).

X Hardware Monitor is a hardware monitor that shows indicators for temperature, voltage, fan speed etc, of a running system with a graphical panel.

The default configuration allows to monitor up to 3 temperatures, 3 fan speeds and 6 voltages. This tool is more particularly adequate for bi-processor systems.