Benjamin Smith

I’ve been on a major self improvement kick lately. I’ve kicked several crazy habits including, but not limited to:

• Smoking
• Biting my nails
• Soda
• Sugar (practicing moderation)

Next on my self improvement quest, I decided to start monitoring bandwidth usage and tracking it on my blog so I(and you!) can follow how much I’m using, and try to trim it down to a reasonable level. I’m not going to play around, I am seriously addicted to the internet. It is one of my oldest, hardest to moderate addictions EVER. I figured if I kept track of how much I actually use on a daily basis that it would help me moderate myself.

So, this morning I downloaded and installed vnstat and initialized the database for my single interface like so:

sudo vnstat -u -i eth0

Where eth0 is the interface all my network traffic routes through. To track multiple interfaces, run the above command again, swapping out eth0 for the other interface.

Next I fired up the following cron:

*/5 * * * * if [ -x /usr/bin/vnstat ] && [ `ls /var/lib/vnstat/ | wc -l` -ge 1 ]; then /usr/bin/vnstat -u; fi

It samples usage on any interface you specify every 5 minutes and creates awesome statistics from it. So, whenever I have a quick break between tasks, I run vnstat and get a glimpse at my usage.

Now, this is the part that scared me a bit.. I never really thought about how much I use. I fired all of this up at ~9:00AM, the snapshot below was taken at 10:45AM.

bsmith@bsmith-desktop [10:47:06 (0.17)] ~ 
-> vnstat
Database updated: Tue Jan 26 10:45:01 2010

    eth0

       received:      40.68 MB (81.6%)
    transmitted:       9.89 MB (18.4%)
          total:      50.57 MB

                    rx     |     tx     |  total
    -----------------------+------------+-----------
        today     40.68 MB |    9.89 MB |   50.57 MB
    -----------------------+------------+-----------
    estimated        89 MB |      20 MB |     109 MB

I, um, yeah I use the internet, a lot..

There are lots of other fun things you can do with vnstat, but I’ll mainly just look at incremental snapshots, and the money shot: daily usage.

Daily output looks like this:

bsmith@bsmith-desktop [10:47:41 (0.09)] ~ 
-> vnstat -d

eth0  /  daily

day         rx      |     tx      |  total
------------------------+-------------+----------------------------------------
26.01.     42.19 MB  |   10.35 MB  |   52.53 MB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:::::
------------------------+-------------+----------------------------------------
estimated       92 MB  |      22 MB  |     114 MB

As said previously, I’m going to post my bandwidth usage daily, either here, or on my Posterous for the next month. I don’t really have a goal here, just want to be able to trim my usage to hopefully stave off some of my internet “dependency” issues..

Stay Tuned!