From: Mark Date: 2008-04-04T20:45:06+09:00 Subject: Re: Monitoring bandwidth Hi Ed, On Wed, 2 Apr 2008 08:47:47 -0500 "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" wrote: > > There are literally hundreds of tools that do exactly that, many of > them open source. However, as the saying goes, "With great power > comes great responsibility." that's scary ;-) > 1. You haven't specified what "all" means. Is it all the traffic in > and out of one specific host, all the traffic in an enterprise, etc.? > The more network segments you care about, the tougher the job becomes > and the bigger the risks are. >> whatever network(s) is/are active at the time ^^^^^^^^^ Yes, definitely wrong choice of words. Network adapter would have been more appropriate. > > 2. There are, in addition to hundreds of tools, hundreds -- no, > millions -- of privacy and security concerns associated with network > monitoring. I'm not interested in what the packets contain, just how many packets are passing across the network adapter (NIC). ie a download/upload rate. Regardless of what protocol is involved (FTP or HTTP etc). For example, I'm downloading Ubuntu updates as we speak and suspect its going a tad slowly. Because I have this mail window maximized I can't see Update Managers dialog so can't see the Download Rate (18.2Kb/sec by the way. Which *is* slow ;-(). What I'd eventually like is (both of these would be applets on a gnome panel for eg): 1 - to have something similar to the System Monitors CPU History graph, but showing download speed. or 2 - even just '18.2Kb/s' displayed on the panel (updates at a specified refresh rate). Much like a temperature applet displays 17 degrees C for eg. sorry for the inaccuracy, -- Mark