Low level network interface download speed monitor

Geneset · 11-06-2008, 11:45 AM

Hi folks
I have a MyBook World Edition and i wanted to write a script to control the lights on the front of it depending on the current download speed but wanted to do it in such a way that it wont run as a daemon but as a cronjob (doesnt need to be any more regular than every 10 minutes or so),
and as such, what i need is a way to get the numeric download speed.

I'm imagining catting from a /dev/....../something that would give me a "raw" reading rather than running ntop or something like that every time and parsing from that.

Sorry if im not explaining myself very well, so to summarise

How do i get the current speed of a network interface?

Regards

Geneset · 11-06-2008, 12:03 PM

I can get the totals for byte downloads from /sys/class/net/eth0/device/net:eth0/statistics/rx_bytes but if anyone knows any better way of getting the RATE of transfer that would be fantastic

Geneset · 11-06-2008, 01:16 PM

Ok, so this is what i have and it will do for the time being

Code:

#!/bin/bash
INITIAL_RX=`cat /sys/class/net/eth0/device/net:eth0/statistics/rx_bytes`
sleep 10
FINAL_RX=`cat /sys/class/net/eth0/device/net:eth0/statistics/rx_bytes`
DELTA_RX=`expr $FINAL_RX - $INITIAL_RX`
KBPS_RX=`expr $DELTA_RX / 10240 `

let "RESULT = $KBPS_RX / 3"
echo $RESULT > "/sys/devices/platform/wdc-leds/leds:wdc-leds:fuel-gauge/brightness"

then to get it to run every 5 mins add this to the crontab (obv change the location of the script, but im lazy
*/5 * * * * /root/rate.bsh