i want to know what "iptables -L -v" tells me:
the first number is the output trafic or the input?

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sorry
stupid question.
pkts bytes
1715 111K

IIRC the first number is the number of packets that have matched that rule and the second number is the total size of those packets. As to whether those numbers are for inbound or outbound packets, it depends on which chain your looking at. If you look closely at the data from iptables -L -v it should give you the data from 3 different chains (INPUT, FORWARD, and OUTPUT)

Something like this:

Chain INPUT (policy DROP 501 packets, 74758 bytes)
pkts bytes
6321 1210K SOME RULE HERE


Chain FORWARD (policy DROP 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes
0 0 ANOTHER RULE HERE

Chain OUTPUT (policy DROP 50954 packets, 3752K bytes)
pkts bytes
38639 16M EVEN MORE RULES HERE


The first two chains (INPUT and FORWARD) apply to packets coming into the machine and the OUTPUT chain applies to outbound packets. Look at the iptables man page for the rest of the output of the -v option.

thanks

if my box is a router i can check the input/output from FORWARD chain, base on the -source/-destination ip?

If you have it set up strictly as a router that just forwards packets across to the other interface, I believe that will show you the traffic. Say you have 2 forwarding rules (one for incoming packets from the net and another to forward packets from your LAN out). The output of iptables -L -v will look like this:



Chain FORWARD (policy DROP 12345 packets, 56789 bytes)
pkts bytes
0 0 RULE TO MATCH INCOMING PACKETS FROM NET (RULE A)
0 0 RULE TO FORWARD PACKETS FROM LAN (RULE B)

The data associated with RULE A will be all your inbound traffic, while the data associated with RULE B will be outbound traffic. If you're looking for something to monitor traffic, that is probably a bad way to do it, as that is going to include crap like ARP requests, DNS queries, etc. If that is what you're looking for try doing a google search for "traffiic monitors AND linux" or try looking at freshmeat or sourceforge. I'm kind of confused about what you're asking, but I hope that helps.

thanks

Yes i want to do traffic monitorig per ip with mrtg. I hope i can find a way to send the data to mrtg with snmp, because my apache server is on other computer.