Transparently monitor bandwidth, when pfSense ISN'T main router
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Hi all,
Our Internet connection is maintained by local authority - we have no control over it - only the LAN.
However, we have need to be able to see which machines are consuming bandwidth out to the Internet. LA claim they can't help with this - fine so we'll try and sort ourselves!
We need something transparent we can plug in between the LAN and the router - is pfSense suitable for this in any configuration or with plugins?
At home I have a SamKnows box which just plugs in between LAN and router which simply counts the traffic as it whizzes by and reports this to SamKnows to help with their stats on ISP speed etc. We need something similar, but that will break the traffic down per IP.
Note proxy logs no use - we aren't particularly interested in web sites visited, but ALL external Internet traffic instead… just a simple counter of MB's per IP over the course of a day.
I see here https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/How_can_I_monitor_bandwidth_usage some possible solutions, but does anyone know if these will only work if pfSense is being used as the router itself?
Any hope, no hope - or anyone familiar with any other options for monitoring bandwidth as described above??
Many thanks :-)
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You could put pfsense in a bridge with filtering turned off and some of the packages mentioned in the link.
I am not sure if they work on the bridge interface or LAN/WAN or if at all. But it is worth a shot.