[BusyBox] Re: [LRP] I need help BAD....

[Charles Steinkuehler]

> Hello all,
> Recently I have been building a firewall system that will, hopefully, turn
> out to be a fairly turn-key solution for many of my customers. I have been
> working on something recently, which I can NOT find any good information
> regarding...and so I rely on the good help of the community.
> How do I go about getting "traffic" statistics from the /proc structure
for
> an ethernet, ppp, or any other type of communication device? Should I even
> be looking at /proc? There are many monitoring programs out there that can
> tell you such information...does anyone know how they work and/or where I
> can find the sources so that I may learn?
> In the end, I am hoping to create a "client" for LCDProc that will give
> current bandwidth utilization for communication devices (eth0 - ethN,
ppp0 -
> pppN, etc), so I am hoping I can donate my resources back to the
community.
> Any help provided is, as always, GREATLY appreciated, and I thank you all
in
> advance!

As mentioned, conventional methods of monitoring traffic involve running
something on the LRP box that looks at the /proc filesystem, or running SNMP
on LRP and using a remote monitoring tool.

There is a third option, which I wanted to see and was coded up by Martin
Hejl:
http://lrp.hejl.de/

This runs a small application on the LRP box that simply shovels data from
the /proc filesystem to a remote java applet, which then digests the data
and presents the user with a pretty graphics showing bandwidth usage.  It
requires less resources than running a full application on the LRP box, and
avoids requiring the monitoring end to install SNMP support (which is rare
in most small installations)...all you need is a web browser.

I intend to fold this java applet into my weblet package, although you could
also use any other LRP based web-server to get it running (thttpd, boa,
etc...).

Charles Steinkuehler
http://lrp.steinkuehler.net
http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net (lrp.c0wz.com mirror)