Bandwidth monitoring?

[rohbawa]

Hi,
I am quite new to pfsense and networking stuff too  ::)… I was looking for any comprehensive package to monitor bandwidth per ip on LAN so I found out about bandwidthd and ntop ... but none of them seems to be working properly for me ... bandwidthd is not showing any graphs and ntop is up and running but its not showing exactly what I was expecting ... like I downloaded a 2 GB file but in ntop its shows quite less ... may be I am not able to configure them correctly or its a compatibility issue with pfsense 2.0.1???
Please suggest others ways of monitoring bandwidth ??

[marcelloc]

If you want a real time monitor, you can install these console based packages

iftop

i386
pkg_add -r http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/8.1-RELEASE/packages/Latest/iftop.tbz

amd64
pkg_add -r http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/amd64/8.1-RELEASE/packages/Latest/iftop.tbz

tcptrack

i386
http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/8.1-RELEASE/packages/Latest/tcptrack.tbz

amd64
http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/amd64/8.1-RELEASE/packages/Latest/tcptrack.tbz

[kalu]

i'm using bandwidthd without any issues on pfsense nanoBsd device.
i installed bandwidthd and showed nothing, then i enabled bandwidthd on LAN interface and it's working perfectly.

[rohbawa]

thanks guys I will soon try iftop and tcptrack … but I just got bandwidthd up and running ... I will wait and see how it turns for me.

[perwkjcnm43]

Hi rohbawa,

Can you tell me how you finally got it working..? I was having the same problem as you, but never managed to make it work.

My situation is pretty simple:
I want to know, for each IP on my LAN, what is their daily and monthly bandwidth consumption.

I installed BandwidthD and configured as follow:
LAN
192.168.9.0/24  <– Yes, all my computers are on the ".9" subnet.
The other checkboxes are UNCHECKED, EXCEPT  DRAW GRAPH (I tried with and without "DRAW GRAPH" but it made no difference).

Whever I try to see the resutls, I get a "bandwidthd has nothing to graph. This message should be replaced by graphs in a few minutes. If it's not, please see the section titled "Known Bugs and Troubleshooting" in the README"

I don't know how to access the readme... :|. I am a noob when it comes to Linux... I saw other threads that referred to "logs", but I didn't even see WHERE I can look into logs..?!

Thanks for any pointers that could help me resolve this.

PS: Running the latest version, on nanobsd1g.

[marcelloc]

if you did not installed bandwidthd these days, try a reinstall, badwidthd package was updated this week.

[phil.davis]

1. Yes, the draw graph checkbox should now be checked on initial install. The graph data should go on and off based on the checkbox setting (previously it always did "draw graph", the checkbox was not effective).
2. The "bandwidthd has nothing to graph…" initial page got cached in my browser (Firefox) - I messed around for a while wondering why nothing displayed, then forcibly refreshed the page and the bandwidthd graphs appeared. So try a page refresh, or clear your browser cache.
3. bandwidthd tries to write its data to different places in "/usr" depending on the pfSense version:

switch ($pfs_version) {
  case "1.2":
  case "2.0":
    define('PKG_BANDWIDTHD_BASE', '/usr/local/bandwidthd');
    break;
  default:
    define('PKG_BANDWIDTHD_BASE', '/usr/pbi/bandwidthd-' . php_uname("m") . '/bandwidthd');
 }

But on nanobsd "/usr" is read-only. So everything goes well until it wants to actually write the graph data!
There used to be some other issues with packages that wrongly left "/usr" read-write. At those times, bandwidthd could "jump in" and write its graph data. If the system was in this state for a few weeks, there were lots of writes to the CF card. I think this was a reason why I killed a CF card a few months ago.
Anyway, bandwidthd on nanobsd is not expected to work at present (certainly does not work on 2.1-BETA0). I am going to make some code changes to put the graph data in "/var" on nanobsd but haven't got to it yet. For that, I also need to think about what to do about periodically saving a copy to the CF card (and at shutdown) and reloading it on startup.