On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Frank Cox theatre@melvilletheatre.com wrote:
Most people would just look at the router's own bandwidth measurement or the one at the ISP's end if that is available.
Possibly, but that wouldn't break it down by machine. And in that situation I'd think a per-machine breakdown would be useful because then you'd know if you should be yelling at the kid, the wife or the family dog when you get the ten thousand dollar ISP bill. Again, it just seems like the sort of thing that folks would want to be able to track in certain situations. But apparently not.
Unless you do a lot of local media streaming or network backups, the per-machine usage should be obvious from the interface traffic. And if you actually want to control it, you would force everything through a proxy with user logins - otherwise it is sort of like measuring water usage by how long everyone is in the shower.
I thought what made your case uncommon was that you had multiple machines and multiple routers and wanted the measurements for each pairing even though the packets go over the same interfaces with no inherent separation.
The separation is the gateway assignment or the lack thereof (for local traffic). But other than that, yep, that's a correct assessment.
If you added interfaces and subnets for each route you wanted to measure separately the normal tools would work naturally.
Indeed, but that adds a whole new layer of complexity to my network that's not really needed for any other purpose.
A couple of NICs and a switch aren't all that complicated - but the iptables counters should work. Or you could push one or the other of your routes though a proxy that keeps its own statistics and factor it back out of the relevant interface traffic.