Bandwidth Accounting With Unix?

LegoB writes: "I am a student at a small, under-connected college. Despite our bandwidth woes, the administration is hesitant at buying a larger pipe, feeling that our current connection is being overly taxed by things like Napster, streaming media, and other non-educational (and non-constructive) traffic. Rather than have them start limiting certain applications, I would like to propose another alternative: bandwidth accounting. I'm hoping to find that Unix, in addition to being used as a router, can also be used as a bandwdith meter. What software packages do I need to track bandwidth by time, IP, and hopefully MAC address without massive kernel hacking?"

Comments

IPaudit is nice

[Brazilian Geek]

I have IPAudit running on two of my servers to keep tabs on internet usage. It sniffs the network and generates a dump text file with all the TCP/IP connections made during the program's runtime. It's files are easy to understand and parse and the processor usage isn't that high (on my 100Mb intranet, with 50% usage the process never goes beyond 25% on a PII 266MHz).

A link to the Freshmeat page is here. I scoured Freshmeat for a userspace/rootspace solution for a bandwidth meter and IPAudit was the best because of it's simplicity. I personally prefer piping data into a perl program to parse the data than to let it become "Someone Else's Problem". The overhead is low and a parsing script isn't that hard to work out, the one I use (actually it's a suite of 2 programs) took 2 days to code and another week to tweak the filtering rules.

I also made a cute little web interface for the higher ups (computer illiterate) to browse through the user's usage - and it wasn't that hard to make. Oh, I don't release it 'cause it's a mess, one day I'll document it and release it, until then - sorry... :)