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1. MRTG and monitoring. Set up MRTG and Netsaint on a Linux box, and charge for installation and tailoring. Think I'm kidding? I bought my first 4x4 almost completely with the money I made setting these things up - companies will be interested in them, if my experience is anything to go by. You'd be surprised!

2. Linux consulting. A lot of companies are running Windows servers that could easily be converted to boxes running Linux/Samba, FTP servers, and so on.

Check if your router supports SNMP. If so, you may be able to graph the traffic nicely with mrtg.

Unfortunately my Dlink DI-713P doesn't support SNMP, so I'm currently without a solution. If I wasn't using a switch I might be able to use snort to generate graphs.

-Pete

MRTG has also joined the fight.

There are many Open Source alternatives around. Big Brother, MRTG, Zabbix comes to mind.
What makes Nagios unique? Thanks.

At my college, we've installed some solar panels on the roof of a dorm to see if it's worth expanding the project to use even more solar. (We have a lot of flat roofs, and in Southern California, that means pretty good solar energy.)

Anyways, we have a website showing the power generated, using the multi-purpose MRTG. It's all running via some student and staff-built hardware, running the OpenVMS port of MRTG by one of the computing and information services gurus.

SOOO if they were stealing premuim cable with a blackbox, would the feds have confiscated their tv's?

I would imagine not.

this sort of thing i believe you'll only see from a small time bandwidth provider, sure it might have cost them a little extra $$, probably nothing too grand. larger providers would certainly just shrug it off and have kicked the users off.

i'd figure if they were reselling bandwidth via cable to customers, they prolly have multiple t1 or t3 line/s peered to some large network/networks (ATT SPRINT), I couldn't imagine a savy (or remotely inteligent) company would attempt to run such a network over partial or bandwidth limited lines. I mean you're already paying for service, paying for infrastructure, they'd probably have some form of BGP routing for a multipoint failsafe connection, nothing of this operation is cheap, why would they skimp on the pipes?

even (especially) if they do run over partial lines, i find it outlandish that they wouldn't watch their bandwidth in real time. What, did they not know they had leaks until they got their bill for that month? This isn't a water provider! This screams lacksidazical administration. Heh, i used to monitor my business' router with MRTG like i was paying for the companies bandwidth out of my own pocket.

I really have no sympathy for any company soo lax on security and bent on making examples out of it's customers. These guys don't deserve to be service providers. Bigger ISP's have bellied up. These guys can't be far behind. 250k my arse, that gets you multiple t3's for a year.

Don't get me wrong, if these users cracked their modems, they certainly deserve some form of punishment, Getting kicked off or fined. (one or the other not both mind you) If they want to prosecute them just do it, there was no reasonable cause to bring the feds in. Such a waste of time and federal money.

I still have yet to figure out why exactly all of these cable providers are limiting bandwidth via these DOCSIS modems, It can't possibly be cheaper to do it that way then over routers can it? Then again, I guess limits at the modem work much in the same way cable boxes do.

So, do you think that if these people would have been stealing cable with a blackbox, if the FBI would have taken their TV's? I've never heard of that happening. (then again i really don't know anyone who's gotten caught either) oh well i guess i have to end my rant and find something productive to do

--Meat

BTW, if any sympatico users with debian boxes running ipmasq are worried about keeping Sympatico honest about their usage, apt-get install ipac.

Better yet, install MRTG. The mrtg-ip-acct program will read the IP accounting statistics directly from your iptables firewall. There is no need for the depracated ipchains compatibility module. Simply create a config file for it, such as /etc/mrtg.cfg:

WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg/
WriteExpires: Yes

Title[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for tourian
PageTop[eth0]: Traffic Analysis for tourian
Target[eth0]: `/usr/bin/mrtg-ip-acct eth0`
MaxBytes[eth0]: 12000000

You will need to have it run every five minutes, using cron, so add an entry to your crontab:

*/5 * * * * root /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg.cfg

Because the default page generated is named .html, for some reason, certain browsers (Internet Explorer) want to cache it no matter what you do. So the easiest thing to do is to wrap it in a PHP script, such as index.php:

My cable modem provider limits us to one gigabyte per day. After numerous arguments with my roommate, including how exactly to read and interpret these graphs, and because they do not cover a day exactly (we are supposedly counted from midnight to midnight), I wrote a simple PHP script to modify the MRTG output with nice, easily readable usage statistics:

http://david.maridia.com/mrtg/

The numbers at the top of the page are always live, since MRTG graphs are not. Note that the page has a latency of at least one second, because it takes two counter readings, one second apart, to generate the current usage rate. This is not always totally accurate, but should be close enough. Reloading the page a couple of times may give better results. The source to the script is available here:

I've gotten even less idea what you're doing, but MRTG can track traffic usage for an amazingly wide number of network (and non-network!) interfaces. If your interface supports SNMP it's automatic; if it doesn't, there is probably some way of dealing with it.

Check out my network usage for an example - integrate the area under the curve and you have net hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly usage, and you can look at the peaks to determine peak (5-min avg) usage. It even keeps track of that machine's CPU temperature and fan speed.

• Firewall/Webserver MRTG Graphs

What a nifty little program! Ah the wonders of SNMP.

MRTG is your friend.
-russ