On 10/20/2012 9:50 AM, Lisa Kachold wrote:

Hi Derek,

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Derek Trotter <expat.arizonan@gmail.com> 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

<snip>

You can enable iptables to do this:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-configuring-ip-traffic-accounting/

Thank you Lisa. I went to the link above and the instructions did look just like what you gave me.

It should look like this:

iptables -N INET_OUT

iptables -N INET_IN

iptables -A FORWARD -j INET_IN

iptables -A FORWARD -j INET_OUT

iptables -A INPUT -j INET_IN
iptables -A OUTPUT -j INET_OUT

To see your data:

iptables -L -v -n

I did this and got the following. I deleted several lines that had 0 in the pkts and bytes columns.

root@wallace:/etc# iptables -L -v -n
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 9634 packets, 1530K bytes)
pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination
11050 1764K ACCEPT     all -- lo     *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
   12 1352 ACCEPT     udp -- eth0   *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           udp spt:53 state ESTABLISHED
6006 763K LOG        all -- *      *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           LOG flags 0 level 4 prefix `InDrop '
   10 2580 DROP       all -- eth0   *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
5996 760K INET_IN    all -- *      *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 3317 packets, 1838K bytes)
pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination
3148 1828K INET_IN    all -- *      *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
3148 1828K INET_OUT   all -- *      *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 9240 packets, 2209K bytes)
pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination
11050 1764K ACCEPT     all -- *      lo      0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
   12   808 ACCEPT     udp -- *      eth0    0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           udp dpt:53 state NEW,ESTABLISHED
5657 1272K INET_OUT   all -- *      *       0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0

Chain INET_IN (2 references)
pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination

Chain INET_OUT (2 references)
pkts bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination

Which of these figures do I look at or add together to find the total amount of data downloaded via eth0 or how much was uploaded via eth0?

This machine runs Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. Any idea what the names of the files are that store the above information or where they are?

Thank you very much
Derek