Free bandwidth 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

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).

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 ).

Linux Bandwidth Arbitrator allows beginning-to-advanced network administrators to control bandwidth. It is designed to be completely turn-key in its default configuration. You just plug it into your network trunk, and it self configures and immediately starts slowing "bandwidth hogs".
It can be configured to target specific applications such as Kazaa, IMAP, and POP. It is compatible with the 2.4.25 kernel, ebtables, and brouter (bridging router). It also comes with denial of service protection.
Main features:
- Default mode is turnkey
- Fully Redundant using Linux built-in Bridging
- Plug it in, no administration needed
- Will automatically scale back heavy bandwidth users (such as p2p traffic) and "normal" users will see a 25 to 40 percent busy hour improvement for activities such as e-mail, chat, and web surfing. There is no need to do any administration, completely turnkey!
- Unique implementation allows you to limit incoming Internet traffic
- Arbitrator 3.x and up work fine with Netfilter on the same machine!
- Automatically scales to Dial Up, DSL, T1, 40mbs
- Determines your actual trunk speed and dynamically adjusts bandwidth limiting accordingly.
Enhancements:
- In this release, there is a new utility that allows a user to see how many connections are current for an existing IP address.
- This will aid operators in deciding which users on their networks are candidates for a connection limit rule.

Bandwidth Meter and Diagnostics is a Firefox extension that will automatically check whether Internet connection is working or not when a website can not be loaded, and a list of tools for network troubleshooting. Try to type a random domain name(e.g., qwqwqwq121212.com) to see what this means ...
This extension adds "Bandwidth Meter" to the Tools Menu. It performs the following tasks:
- Display your public IP address
- Display your public domain name
- Test download speed/bandwidth
- Test upload speed/bandwidth
This extension runs under any OS. If you use Windows, you could try our other Windows specific extension "Broadband Speed test and Diagnostics" that has extra features and can only run under Windows. We are creating this because we get many requests from non-windows users.

Bandwidth Management Tools is a total bandwidth management solution for Linux and can be used for firewalling, traffic graphing, and shaping.
Bandwidth Management Tools is not based on any currently-available bandwidth management software and supports packet queues, bursting, complex traffic flow hierarchies, flow groups, traffic logging, and a simple real-time monitoring front-end.
Main features:
- XML configuration file format:
- Class based traffic categorization
- POWERFULL for advanced users!!
- Firewalling:
- Support for all Netfilter features on host operating system
- Traffic shaping (flows):
- Shaping of blocks or single ip addresses
- Support for bursting based on user definable average period
- Multi-level shaping, you can define parents & grand parents
- Traffic logging:
- Logging of byte, packet, burst & drop counters
- Traffic flow grouping
- Misc:
- Atomic loading of firewall tables into kernel
- Supports more than 1 CPU
Whats New in 0.2.3 Release:
- Development snapshot 200602012132 has been released as stable.
- The URLs in graphs generated by bwm_graph has been fixed.
Whats New in 200603080716 Release:
- Logging directly to RRD files was added.
- Graphing was fixed, and error handling was improved.
- rrdtool was fixed so that if it is built at installation time, its also installed.
- New flow parameters were added: report-format, report-filename, and flow-mode.