Programming an internet usage monitor.

[slykehn]

I want to write something which monitors internet usage and emails it to me. I know that there are plenty of these programs available for download but I am more interested in how it all works than actually using it. If anyone can give me some direction it would be much appreciated. Google yields a lot of commercial results, which are not very fruitful to this particular endeavor. Many thanks.

[streaker69]

I want to write something which monitors internet usage and emails it to me. I know that there are plenty of these programs available for download but I am more interested in how it all works than actually using it. If anyone can give me some direction it would be much appreciated. Google yields a lot of commercial results, which are not very fruitful to this particular endeavor. Many thanks.

Most of the graphing programs out there that are opensource are using RRDTool written by Tobias Ottiker and then they write a display interface on top of that. I'm not sure why you would want to go and re-invent the wheel though when there's lots of good solutions already out there that you can view their source and see how they work.

Cacti is good, so is Ntop. You'll need hardware that supports SNMP to be able to graph traffic flows. Getting managed hardware is normally out of the price range for your normal home network though.

[Gitsnik]

First note that I fully support what streaker has said, however I am not closed to the idea of re-inventing the wheel to learn or re-iterate an issue. It's a good method of learning.

So, two tips:

1. iptables matches packet counts to rules if you do it right. You can poll these out if you like (I've done this previously).
2. A more accurate option is to crack open a (perl) script that sniff's the interface and logs the size of each packet, source/dest and ports. I've also done this but it proved to be overkill, the packet-logger above was just as useful.

[slykehn]

Ok so my first goal is simply keeping track of websites visited (much like the big brother software some parents use to monitor children). I have found some info on .dat files storing this information even after history is deleted. Has anyone ever tried mining these files to accomplish this? Obviously it's not nearly as dynamic or accurate as packet monitoring, but it has piqued my interest. Thank you for the responses by the way; I have looked into both presented solutions and found intriguing information.