Bandwidth usage meter?

goynang

Some guy
Anyone know of a decent broadband bandwidth usage meter for OS X?

Just got broadband and I have a 2gb a month limit but no easy way to check it out.

Freeware ideally! ;o)
 
Sorry, I wasn;t clear enough.

I don't want to know my current speed or network throughput. I want a historical record of how much bandwidth I've used (per month ideally) so I can see when I'm getting close to my 2gb per month limit.

I did a few seaches (including on this forum) and didn't find anything that really did what I wanted. There's plenty of apps that come close but so far none I found gave me the historical total - which is key.

I have since located...

http://www.starcoder.com/xrg/

http://xmonitor.forked.net/

...whcih I will try out soon.
 
I remember there was a thread on the same thing. Lot of ppl have volume-based internet accounts and want to know when they should reduce their tranfer. Check out search. The post starter finally found an app for this case.
 
I always wonder ... if these utilities can display these data, where do they get them? They must be stored somewhere on your system and often these glitzy monitors are jsut pretty graphical front-ends to good old CLI utilities. So, I suppose there already is a log or a command which can easily reveal your up- and download stats in your systems. The trick is to find out where exactly it is ... any chance of checking the sources of those apps out to see where they find the data?

EDIT: BTW Darkstat is also available through Fink
 
sudo ipfw -a list

the -a means include the byte counters in the list as well. If you're a slacker like me, you won't have your firewall turned on (I do have a router/firewall between me and the big bad internet though), and all you'll see is the one default rule:

65535 1159997 393855140 allow ip from any to any

The numbers mean:
rule number 65535, which has matched 1159997 packets, for a total of 39385140 bytes, is "allow ip from any to any"

Note that, if you have a fancy rule set that uses dynamic rules, you'll be missing much of the traffic, because the rules that matched it will have disappeared from the current list
 
I tried sudo ipfw -a list, got various bits of info back (yep, I have my firewall on). Interesting.

Now, I need to convert it into a more readable format and somehow track it over time so I can split it into months. A cron job methinks. Stuff to research!

I still haven't found any software that does what I want. None of the posts on this forum on similar topics have lead me to anything I'm happy with. They all seem to track every stat under the sun but never really let you do it over time (i.e. between restarts etc.). Or perhaps I'm just missing something.

Looks like I'm gonna have to sharpen my terminal skills.
 
Yeah, the firewall stats are since bootup only. You can reset them with
ipfw zero

If you don't seen any rules that mention 'check-state' or 'keep-state' then you're not using dynamic rules - the counts will be complete, since there won't be rules popping in and out of existence and taking their byte counts with them.
 
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