Bandwidth Monitor (vnstat)

I've found vnstat to be useful for monitoring bandwidth on Raspbmc (although it would work fine on Debian squeeze too)

Link here - http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/330

To install type - sudo apt-get install vnstat

Then to start it type - sudo vnstat -u -i eth0

I found that it wasn't updating the database automatically (i guess this may be a permission issue, beyond my beginner linux knowledge!) to get round this, when you want to view the stats type - sudo vnstat --update
Then just type - vnstat
to view.

You can also do vnstat --live to well erm see the activity live...

There are a variety of commands in the help page too.

Apologies if any of that is incorrect or useless, I'm a linux beginner and typing on my phone - typos highly likely!
I found this quite useful while live streaming with tvcatchup

Note: this will count all traffic to/from the pi regardless of wan/lan!

Gary

Thanks for the tool I'll have to check it out.

One thing to note is that Linux keeps track of this in a file as well.

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cat /proc/net/dev

This will return the counter of all of the traffic passing through off of the interfaces.

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Inter-|   Receive                                                |  Transmit
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo:     560       8    0    0    0     0          0         0      560       8    0    0    0     0       0          0
  eth0: 36911726  587879    0    0    0     0          0         0  1043482   10340    0    0    0     0       0          0


It makes for a fun coding project to extract the right field and the the bandwidth.