DarkStat – Network Bandwidth/Traffic monitoring for Linux *NIX

admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:19:08 +0000

DarkStat is a simple nTop like Packet Sniffing Network Traffic/Bandwidth monitoring utility for your Linux/Unix. DarkStat relies on libpcap and presents simple webinterface with nice graphs and stats aut-refreshed. The main advantage of Darkstat is that of the footprint and the memory, CPU usage.

DarkStat can run on most of the UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD,OpenBSD,NetBSD,Solaris,Mac OS. There are also packages for Gentoo Opensuse and Debian

Installation is fairly straight forward and no configuration is required. Rather if required you can play around. DarkStat also has a nice Man page.

DarkStat runs in the background of many Cable/DSL routers and are used in pfSense, redWall opensource firewalls.

Lets install DarkStat in Debian here

As always, install the pre-requisites

Install ZLib

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# aptitude install zlib1g-dev

Install libpcap

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# aptitude install libpcap-dev

That’s it lets get installing DarkStat

If you choose to install from the Debian Packages then it is as simple as using the aptitude utility

Install DarkStat as Debian package

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# aptitude install darkstat

Install from Source

If you want to install from source then here we are

Download from here

debian4R2Base:~# http://dmr.ath.cx/net/darkstat/darkstat-3.0.707.tar.bz2

Unzip and Untar

debian4R2Base:~/# tar -jxvf darkstat-3.0.707.tar.bz2

Compile and Install

debian4R2Base:~/# cd darkstat-3.0.707

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# ./configure

Sometime throws error so run with the “–with-chroot-dir” arguement

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# ./configure –with-chroot-dir

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# make && make install

That completes the installation.

To start DarkStat

debian4R2Base:~/darkstat-3.0.707# darkstat -i eth0

where “eth0″ is the interface that you monitor traffic coming in and going out. Change it as in your system.

Now, darkstat starts and sniffs in the background and loads a simple web interface at http://localhost:666 or if you are browsing from a different machine then http://:666 (example: http://192.168.19.131:666)

Once in, no explanation needed all depicted in simple easy graphs showing almost realtime info and historical. So with the hosts and ports. Great tool no wonder used in Cable/DSl routers and in well known OpenSource Firewalls. Well Done!!!

OpenSource NetMonitoring » dsl

DarkStat – Network Bandwidth/Traffic monitoring for Linux *NIX

Related Post