Monitoring how much bandwidth each user is using in a small network
 

Hi,

I have many roommates that are connected to the Internet through a router. Since I download movies from aXXo, I want to use my bittorrent client, whenever nobody else is using the Internet.

I use nmap to scan the network to see how many people are connected. However, sometimes my roommates keep their computers on and don't use it. That's why I am looking for a way to see if I can find out how much of bandwidth they're using.

I'm not quite sure if that is possible. My understanding of the problem is that to achieve that I need to set my computer as a bridge between other computers and the router so that I can easily monitor the bandwidth. However, I don't want my computer to act like a bridge, since it's not on all the time.

My router is a pretty basic one (Netgear WGR614 V6).

Also, I was wondering if there's any way to specify how much of bandwidth each user can use? I checked my router setting page, but I didn't find any options for that.

Any idea how to achieve such feature?

at minimum, you're going to need a computer with a tap on the link going to the router to capture the netflow. It would have to be online all the time to be accurate.

A cool way to do it would be to get a junker box to run iptables firewall/router... then you can make specific rules to monitor bandwidth for each host. But again, it would have to be on all the time.

I think I was guessing right. I wish my router could provide me all the information about the live bandwidth usage. I also wished that there was a way to set a specific bandwidth to each user based on the available bandwidth using the router alone. I'm not sure if expensive routers can do that or not.

You could get a "cheap" Cisco router from ebay.
But this being a linux forum..you could get a pc install some linux distribution on it or maybe a Linksys WRT54g router and put Linux on it.
Linksys WRT54g with Linux on it is the better choice because it's smaller, takes little power to operate and makes no noise

I didn't know I can install Linux for $60 range routers. I'm gonna read and learn about the process of installing Linux on the routers and how they work.

Thanks for the information.