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From: Herbert Wolverson <herbert@charizard.tsghelp.com>
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Subject: Re: FreeBSD tool for network bandwidthmeasure  ?
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On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 10:34:20PM -0700, dt wrote:

> Is there any standard (or non) FreeBSD tool that is used to measure a
> current network throughput/bandwidth? And also, what are the
> requirements to do so, and do I need to be root to run, or do I need to
> load a special kernel module?

ntop and trafshow from the ports are both very good. They require that you
have BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) compiled into the kernel (its there by
default, I believe), and read access to /dev/bpf*. By default, only root
has that - I sometimes give it to wheel, just so that I don't need to
su to root in order to run the monitor.

For longer term monitoring, if you install net-snmp and mrtg from the ports
you can get nice graphs showing bandwidth usage and trends (as well as use
any SNMP monitor program to keep tabs on bandwidth use).

IPA (IP Accounting), also in ports, is nice if you need fine grained
monitoring - for example monitoring specific services/IPs' bandwidth use
over time. It requires that you use count rules in your firewall, and
works off there.

Hope that helps,
Herbert.