SUMMARY: Measuring the bandwidth used in our 56K line.

From: David Smith (dpsmith@lbin.com)
Date: Fri Dec 06 1996 - 21:10:19 CST


Question:

We have a 56K line coming into our office.
This line goes into a Livingston IRX 1-11 PortMaster
router. Our Lan is a bus.
I am using a Sparc 10 with Solaris 2.5.1 with one ethernet
interface le0.
 
I am trying to figure out how much of the 56K we
actually use, i.e. I want to montior it / log it ...
 
(I already have software for analyzing the ethernet.)
 
I want something to tell me what percentage of
the 56K is being used by us, because it could actually
be cheaper to pay per volume of traffic on a fractional
T1 line than it is to pay for our current 56K line.

Answer:

This is what I am now using.

1. I enabled SNMP in the Livingston PortMaster.

2. I installed ucd-snmp-3.1.2
   from UCDavis at: ftp://ftp.ece.ucdavis.edu/pub/snmp/
   This is a strain of the original CMU code.
   Its easy to compile and configure.

3. I installed a package called router-stats from:
   http://www.scn.de/~iain/router-stats/
   This is a collection of Perl scripts that are easy to configure
   and generate HTML pages containing gifs of your routers usage
   statistics.

   And a few simple crontab entries takes care of the statistics
   collection and generation when all is working.

Some other suggestions:
- bing from http://web.cnam.fr/Network/bing.html
  It is a Bandwidth pING.
  This I use all the time. It is very useful.

- Driver Aces, Inc. IP Quota software - IPCTL
  This is quite useful especially if you are a
  site that is charged based on network usage.
  I'll take a closer look when I get time.

- MRTG, a SNMP package from http://mailer.gu.se/traffic/mrtg.html
  This uses cmu-snmp.
  mrtg and cmu-snmp can be found at:
  ftp://ftp.dmu.ac.uk/pub/netcomm/src/internet/
  I wasted a lot of time trying to compile and configure these.

- Ask our ISP for router statistics.
  I did this and I got some poor quality faxes of a printout
  of some postscript to gifs. When asked what software they used
  I received a reply that it was home-grown and hey they were
  going to start offering router usage statistics for a fee.

- For a router that supports SNMP check out Neon Software
  http://www.neon.com/. They sell a product called CyberGuage
  for the Mac.

- I would like to recommend scotty-2.1.5. It contains a network
  editor called Tkined (tkined1.4.5) that requires Tcl 7.5 and Tk 4.1.
  http://wwwsnmp.cs.utwente.nl/~schoenw/scotty/

  They are available from:
  ftp://ftp.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/pub/local/tkined/,
  ftp://netlab-c.mscs.mu.edu/scotty/

Thanks to:

Dan Penrod <penrod@wcnewmedia.com>
Glenn Satchell <Glenn.Satchell@Uniq.com.au>
David Montgomery <david@cs.newcastle.edu.au>
L. Lopshire <ayn@pacifier.com>
Alex Finkel <afinkel@pfn.com>
Rahul Roy <roy@bluestone.COM>

Thanks for all the help.
Dave.

--
   David Smith,  Lightbinders, Inc.
   E-mail: dpsmith@lbin.com | WWW: http://lbin.com/
   Voice: (415) 621-5746    | Fax: (415) 621-5898
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