Hi,

I'm looking for a way to monitor the IP traffic form a local unix user (running an application).

I used to do it on freebsd with the following rules in ipfw and parse the counters:
ipfw -q add 1500 pass all from any to any uid UNIXUSER in via xl0
ipfw -q add 1510 pass all from any to any uid UNIXUSER out via xl0

I can't find a way to do it with iptables or any other means on linux ?
Do you guys have a clue on how i could do it.

just in case you asked, this user runs a daemon and multiple scripts. It listens on one port but connects to many clients on a variety of ports. So it's a nightmare to create rules to capture it's traffic. That's why i used the user level on BSD (which, sadly I'm not running on this server).

Thx

iptables can match traffic on user id, group id, process id, session id, command owner, the last three may be broken on SMP kernels though.

thanks, somehow i missed it.

It tried (with many variations)
iptables -A INPUT -m owner --uid-owner 1001 -j ACCEPT
and i got
iptables: Invalid argument
dmesg : ip_tables: owner match: bad hook_mask 2/24

iptables -V >> iptables v1.4.0

I check the doc and it seems that only OUPUT is supported. They say it's hard to know who owns an incoming socket: well is you have a daemon running and listening it should not be that hard. It works fine on BSD.

Anyway, too bad this feature hasn't been implemented.