Hi all,

What is the best bandwidth reporting/shaping utility for Linux? I'm looking to put a box in place to monitor/shape traffic for various office locations. If a certain package is known to co-exist or interact with common tools such as squid/dansguardian/etc that would be a plus but not a requirement.

Any ideas?

PS: Hope this is the right section, I posted it here because I assumed that network discussions would eventually take place (ie where would the box sit, would the card need to be in promiscuous mode, etc).

Thanks!

Mmmm ... I don't know much about a lot application, but i know one that can do all the thing you mentionated.
Is name is VTun http://vtun.sourceforge.net/ ... You should check it out.

Seeya.

Thank you for the recommendation. I already have a Juniper VPN appliance at all of our sites, would it be an acceptable solution to only use vtun for my traffic monitoring/shaping needs? This would be to monitor Internet traffic and ensure that the traffic used is more for business needs and not personal.

Ohh ... Da#@ ! ... I didn't see the Monitoring part ... My bad.
Well, for that you can always use Nmap ... Is one of the best network monitors you can find outhere.
About Vtun, is easy to configure, it allows to work over TCP and UDP Traffic, you can make shapping traffic and make it secure, by encrypting all the data that flows through the tunnel (use Blowfish encryption).
Both applications are simple and small and work very well.

I hope to more useful this time.

Seeya.

MRTG probably not the best - but very useful.

but i still dont get your idea how to monitor various external traffic (branches) with your linux box, and to shape them? why dont you go to juniper website, and check their network management. I dont know about their other product but for their Netscreen firewall i've used NSSM.

HTH.

Thanks I'll check out MRTG. Yes technically I can shape traffic with QOS on the netscreen so technically it is not needed. But basically my plan is for this box to monitor all traffic and then I can see where my bandwidth is going. I am sometimes losing 100kbps on my T1 due to some unknown traffic and right now I have very little tools to trace it. So I'm hoping that I can put a box in place to do this.

Windows has a solution which is relatively cheap called NetLimiter but then I'd need a separate box just for that purpose. I'd rather consolidate my proxy/web filtering/bandwidth monitoring all on one box if possible.

Hi,

We use the SafeSquid Composite 20 edition (free) as our content filtering proxy and application layer firewall. It has a feature 'Limits' that can be used to throttle QoS based on user, group, website being visited, mime type, size of content being downloaded, time, etc.

You can also define other parameters like Download transfer limit, Upload transfer limit and no. of Request allowed.

It also has a feature 'Multi Proxy', that can be used to control multiple SafeSquid proxies, installed in the same or remote locations. One SafeSquid server is configured as Master, and the remaining as Slave. All slave servers pick up rules from the Master. SO now you need to configure only the Master Server, while the slaves follow. You can also define specific rules for specific slaves.

Of course, it also has many other features like url filter, url blacklist, mime filter, cookie filter, header filter, built-in clients for a number of open source (ClamAV) and commercial AVs, universal ICAP client to talk to any ICAP server, content caching, ICP, CARP, request forwarding, url redirecting, document rewrite to block scripts like activex, java, appalets, etc., PAM to talk to external authenticating servers, etc. etc. etc.

If you would like to try it, you can download the full features free version that can be happily used in a 20-30 user network, from http://downloads.safesquid.net/free/...20-free.tar.gz
You need to register on the forum at http://www.safesquid.com/forum and use your ID to access the downloads site.

Best Regards