On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Frank Cox <theatre at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com