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I am using FreeBSD 6.1 as router. Now I looking for Network Traffic Monitoring software to see what's happening with internet link. I have two installed LAN cards in my system, one for lan and other for wan traffic I also have a static IP address on wan side and do not have X system installed (only console). I sow a lot of things at Fresh Ports for FreeBSD but I can't decide what is best for me.

Some of my requests are: -To be easy to install and maintain (I am not pretty well in Linux) -To I can see what is load of network and who is taking most of bandwidth. -And regarding to my earlier question to I can see whats happening in my local network and what site visiting each one local IP address with minor of statistic for it

Thanks in advance Admir

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  • How in the world was this off-topic? It's system admin related and has plenty of answers.
    – Sue Mynott
    Apr 18, 2020 at 11:28

13 Answers 13

7

I have had great success with the following packages. You do need to know about your network and some linux basics to get everything logged. You will need to log traffic for the ips on your network using the firewall to be able to get graphs for each of them.

6

Munin is a great tool for graphing system resources including the network, it does not do all the things that you are asking for but it will get you a pretty good idea of the system load. Munin is available in FreeBSD ports both the server and client

alt text http://munin.projects.linpro.no/attachment/wiki/PercentGraphHowto/donald.hjemme.ruberg.no-fw_conntrack-day.png?format=raw

3

Darkstat is a very simple but powerful network traffic monitoring program that displays information about network traffic moving over an interface via HTTP. It will do 90% of what you need with none of the hassle of using a more feature rich but complicated solution like Naigos.

darkstat graphs

2

I recommend ntop

1

Munin can be a bit of a CPU drain on the monitoring server. Plus the communication between server and client is not secured, you will have to tunnel the monitoring traffic if you need security.

I have always prefered snmp-based solution such as aformentioned cacti and mrtg as they support snmpv3, which offers better security.

1

I second the call for ntop. We use it for internal traffic monitoring on our Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. According to ntop.org, FreeBSD is also supported.

We also set our managed switch to forward all traffic to and from our router to the NIC which ntop tracks.

To see the Network Load graph:

Summary --> Network Load

And to see the per-device usage:

All Protocols --> Throughput

Where you can sort by data per second and packets per second.

1

Gotta love Cacti!

1

Nagios

Here's a page I created detailing my setup of nagios on freebsd

1

ntop is great, requires little by way of configuration and there's a port! You can access the control panels and graphs via HTTP, too--so it's completely platform independent.

whereis ntop
cd to the ports directory it gives you
make install clean
echo "ntop_enable="YES" >> /etc/rc.conf
1

nobody mentioned iptraf?

1

IPAudit

We've used this and it's pretty handy. It could give you pretty granular info about outgoing/incoming bandwidth. There is a port for FreeBSD.

Here are some screenshots:

alt text
(source: sourceforge.net)
alt text
(source: sourceforge.net)

You can access documentation for it here: http://ipaudit.sourceforge.net/. Again though port information is here: port for FreeBSD.

0

If you really want to drill down what is happening on you network, you could take a look at the many different Netflow based applications. They consist of a probe that collects data about each connection the machine makes (a flow) and and forwards ports, IPs, time, duration and all kinds of good data to a collector that can assimilate the data from many probes. Then you can analyze that data at your leisure. Since your are running freeBSD your can use pflowd as a probe, it just translates information PF naively generates. I have it setup at home and it has a very minimal footprint.

Edit Its worth noting that this is a fairly complicated solution to setup, and in retrospect I think it may be too detailed from what you need.

0

Trafshow could also help you here. It's a simple top like tool for network traffic: http://www.freebsdsoftware.org/net/trafshow.html

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