What is a a good way to track over time the amount of data transferred from my ubuntu machine to another host on the internet?
1 Answer
That greatly depends on how you transfer it. If you have some sort of a VPN, then vnstat can track traffic per interface. These are for example monthly statistics from a VPN I'm using:
# vnstat -m -i tun0
tun0 / monthly
month rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
Sep '12 26.36 GiB | 894.47 MiB | 27.23 GiB | 88.12 kbit/s
Oct '12 49.80 GiB | 1.90 GiB | 51.70 GiB | 161.92 kbit/s
Nov '12 25.93 GiB | 1.20 GiB | 27.12 GiB | 87.78 kbit/s
Dec '12 27.64 GiB | 1.24 GiB | 28.88 GiB | 90.46 kbit/s
Jan '13 17.11 GiB | 745.23 MiB | 17.83 GiB | 125.83 kbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
estimated 38.54 GiB | 1.64 GiB | 40.17 GiB |
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
Of course, this is per network interface, not per host. vnstat can be configured to keep a persistent database (flat files).
Another way would be to set up a forward rule in iptables and read iptables traffic statistics (iptables -nv).
But a proper solution would be to use dedicated software with traffic accounting. DrFTPD has a quota plugin.
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some of it is http(s) traffic and some of it is imaps traffic. i don't think DrFTP plugin will help in my case :) Feb 2, 2013 at 2:23