Monitor bandwidth usage for each computer in LAN

[Bob Chiodini]

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 17:20 -0400, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 16:38, Thomas Cameron wrote:
> > >
> > > Hello,
> > > I have a cable connection that come to my D-Link Combo (wired / wireless)
> > > router in my home network. There are three wired computers and one
> > > wireless
> > > laptop connected to the router right now. Is there any easy way to monitor
> > > the broadband bandwidth usage for each computer (ie. outgoing and incoming
> > > bandwidth) ? Can mrtg do this ?
> > >
> > > Thank you.
> > >
> > > Reuben D. Budiardja
> > 
> > I think ntop can do this, can't it?  Anyone?
> > 
> > TC
> 
> ntop can do it if you run ntop on that particular system.  If you had a
> linux box acting as the router ntop would be able to collect some very
> interesting stats for all traffic that passed through the firewall.
> 
> mrtg may be able to do it.  However I have not run mrtg against a linux
> box, just cisco switches.  Not sure if the mib on the linux box contains
> the network information you would want for such stats.  Would have to
> check that.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Scot L. Harris
> webid at cfl.rr.com
> 
> No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after
> eating one peanut.
> 		-- Channing Pollock 
> 
MRTG can indeed get bandwidth statistics from a Linux box.  You must run
the SNMP daemon on the target machine.  It cannot, by default, discern
traffic destinations, it only looks at totals passing through the
network interfaces (IIRC ifInOctets, ifOutOctets, and ifInerrors and
IfOutErrors).  The OP did not specify the OS's running on the boxes of
interest, but I suspect that if a SNMP daemon exists for non-Linux OS's
the data would be available to MRTG.

As stated/implied by others the most non-intrusive method would be to
let MRTG query a managed switch.  The D-Link router is not managed
(AFAIK).

Bob...