BWM-NG – Network Bandwidth & Disk I/O Monitoring

admin — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:52:01 +0000

Bandwidth Monitor NG (bwm-ng) is a simple small console based live Network and Disk I/O Bandwidth monitor for Linux, Unix, BSD,Solaris, Mac OSx, Windows based platforms.

There is no fancy GUI or interfaces simple console utility which installs and runs flawlessly showing live stats of your Network or Disk I/O stats.

Disk I/O support is only added in the latest stable version bwm-ng 0.6 and Disk I/O is not supported on Windows Platforms yet.

Features include

support for /proc/net/dev, netstat, getifaddr, sysctl, kstat for Network Monitoring

support for /proc/diskstats /proc/partitions, IOKit, devstat and libstatgrab for Disk I/O Monitoring

Support for unlimited number of Network interfaces/devices

Dynamic Addition and Deletion of interfaces/devices to the list

Whitelist and blacklist of interfaces/devices

Output formats of KB/s, Kb/s, packets, errors, average, max and total sum

Output in curses, plain console, CSV or HTML

While packages are available for most of the platforms, installation is fairly straight forward. Download, compile and install as follows:

I did the installation in Debian but should be the same for most of the platforms

Download

debian4R2Base:/etc# wget http://www.gropp.org/bwm-ng/bwm-ng-0.6.tar.gz

Untar & Unzip

debian4R2Base:/etc# tar -zxvf bwm-ng-0.6.tar.gz

Compile & Install

debian4R2Base:/etc# cd bwm-ng-0.6

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# ./configure

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# make && make install

You have to install “libstatgrab”, if you choose to use it

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# aptitude install libstatgrab6

That completes the installation.

In debian, if you want to use the aptitude package manager to install then you need to install from the unstable source http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/bwm-ng as this contains the latest version with disk I/O support.

If disk I/O is not required then can install bwm-ng 0.5 from the stable sources

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# aptitude install bwm-ng

Once installed simply running “bwm-ng” will default to Network stats on all interfaces. You can use bwm-ng for all options.

For stats on all network Interfaces

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# bwm-ng

For stats on Select Network Interface

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# bwm-ng -I eth0

where eth0 is the network interface

For stats on Disk I/O

debian4R2Base:~/bwm-ng-0.6# bwm-ng -i disk

(Reads from /proc/diskstat)

In Windows, simply download, unzip the file and run the EXE file. For more information, visit the homepage here

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 » network

BWM-NG – Network Bandwidth & Disk I/O Monitoring

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DarkStat – Network Bandwidth/Traffic monitoring for Linux *NIX

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