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Situation

I currently have a Pipex broadband account which is £26.99/month and has a usage limit of 15GB/Month. I want to reduce the amount I spend on my ISP so need a way to check if I actually need the 15GB allowance, or if I can go for less. I recently joined a thread on ubuntuforums.org on this topic but since it has gone a bit stale I thought I would write up my experiences here.

Before I go any further, let me define a couple of terms. Imagine your connection from your house to the internet is a big pipe

• Data Transfer
  This relates to how much data is transferred over time, usually a month. This term is normally used in specifying web hosting packages. This is what I am interested in for the purpose of this tutorial
• Bandwidth
  Bandwidth relates to the range of data that can be squeezed down the pipe at any one time. If you have a high bandwidth, this normally relates to a high speed internet connection meaning you can download faster.

Specification

It must run under Linux, as that is what I use and must be capable of keeping historical data on datatransfer and bandwidth. I have maximum (that I know of) two PC's (WinXP and Xubuntu) using the Belkin F5D7632-4 v3000 Wireless Modem/Router to access the internet. Wireless is always switched off and the router has 4 x 10/100 Ethernet ports.

Research

My first instinct was to find a piece of software that I could install on my Xubuntu laptop, which would them monitor the network activity. It soon became apparent that having the software just on the laptop wouldn't measure activity on the other computer. What was required was something that could interface with the Belkin router and measure activity at that point.

The Belkin has a web based control panel to configure and use the router. It doesn't have any logging information. There are no firmware upgrades available for the router that would possibly add this feature. I could install an opensource modem/router firmware onto the Belkin, examples of this are both Linux based projects, OpenWRT and DD-WRT. Unfortunately the Belkin's chipset isn't yet supported by these projects.

Network monitoring software is available for linux as proved by this wikipedia page. One feature which is of particular interest is SNMP. SNMP is a service that emits information. This can be made available to the network. I tried out Nagios from the list, installing it was easy, follow the guide they provide. Unfortunately, once again, I have found that the Belkin doesn't support SNMP. I was impressed by Nagios though, a very feature rich Linux monitoring application.

Solution

A dedicated machine to handle network activity, something that will sit between any computer on my internal network accessing the internet and the router, any external traffic gets sent via this machine. I have a spare desktop Athlon 1200 512mb sitting around, so why not put it to good use? A quick purchase from ebuyer gave me an 8 -port hub, two NIC (Network Interface Cards) and a 1m CAT5 cable for around £24!

That's the hardware sorted, now on to the software. Something needs to run on the machine. A quick bit of research concluded that IPCOP would be a good choice (maybe Smoothwall or even m0n0wall looks interesting.

Part 2: Installing IPCOP