I managed to solve my problem.  Today someone told me about an app 
called Darkstat

http://unix4lyfe.org/darkstat/

It's in the ubuntu repository  and it monitors eth0 right out of the 
box. It gives you stats for the last minute, hour, day and 30 days.

On 10/20/2012 10:16 AM, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
> iptables can do traffic accounting (I think Lisa gave some good pointers there), but you might also want to *control* the bandwidth usage (say throttle to a low speed when you get over 80% of your limit, or block YouTube after it consumes XX% of the limit).
> For that the "tc" utility may be used to manage the IP traffic control features of the Linux kernel on your gateway box.
> TC is fairly complicated (unless you read about traffic queuing disciplines for fun), and the only GUI tool I know of, ktctool(http://ktctool.berlios.de/) is a bit old; last updated in 2006.
> You might be able to find a few other ui options with some careful google searching (rather high junk ratio in a couple test searches I did).
>
> On 10/20/2012 08:38 AM, Derek Trotter wrote:
>> My ISP imposes a monthly quota.  If the total amount of data I download and upload exceeds that quota I get billed extra. Everything I send or receive passes through my full time linux box. Is there something I can install on it that would monitor and log how much data passes through eth0?
>>
>> thanks
>
>
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