I'm desperately in need of a Linux software that would give me a report on my internet connection. I'm connected to this pathetic ISP who's connection from my end keeps going down every two minutes (even though for a little while), but my downloads keeps getting interrupted, and it's generally frustrating. One moment I can have a DL of 512kbps and the next moment it's 0kbps. At times browsing won't be available, but other things like chat will be working fine.
The problem is, I've signed up with them on an annual package and made advance payment. Now they keep telling me there is nothing wrong with their internet provision and I cannot ask for my money.
That is why I need some app that will sit in my PC and monitor the connection o24/7 and give me a report of how many times the connection kept going down, average speeds, etc.., which I can give to them.

I've tried installing Nagios, MRTG and others from synaptic, but don't even know how to start them up - they're not even appearing in the main menu. I tried to load MRTG from the terminal but it tells me:
I even tried what it tells me, but no luck and I don't even know if I'm on the right track by using Nagios or MRTG?

Use "crontab -e" to add the following line to cron.
From: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1181052

This will do a ping every minute and save the result of it to the file pings.log along with the timestamp. The first number of each entry is the error code:
* 0 means the ping succeeded (internet is up).
* 1 means there was no response (internet is down).
* 2 means DNS isn't working.

Make sure you can actually ping to the website to begin with, ie: a firewall isn't blocking your pings. Simply run "ping -c 5 www.google.com" to find out.

Also, I find ISP provided DNS generally stinks and accounts for a lot of issues. Before you try this to monitor your internet connection, try switching your /etc/resolv.conf to point to OpenDNS:

[QUOTE=keithieopia;4008953]Use "crontab -e" to add the following line to cron.{/QUOTE]
Keithieopia, thanks so much.

I tried the crontab command you sent, but unfortunately it says there is no crontab file present, so I selected the option to make one. I've placed the ping command you've given.
Does this mean that the ping command will startup and rn in the background automatically when I boot up my PC?

Where is the location of the ping (log) file?

yep, I get a round trip reply.

I don't know if changing the DNS will do any good. I opened the /etc/resolv.com and it saysbut I have a router in between my pc and the device connecting my home to the ISP. The router settings are controlled by the ISP and p/word protected, not allowing me to make any changes.

However, I need something more than ping. Ping will only give a report on the connection being active, but I need much more - graphs showing the quality of internet I'm getting and downtime I experience. I believe by the end of the month the ping log file wil be pages and pages, won't it? and my ISP will not even look through all that.

I was googling for linux bandwidth monitors and cam across http://www.ubuntugeek.com/bandwidth-...for-linux.html
from here I saw cacti, and when I went to synaptic, I see cacti is already even installed on my machine - but how do I load it?

[QUOTE=fkasmani;4009311]The best way to figure out cacti or mrtg or nagios is to read the documentation.
Here are the docs for cacti.


http://www.cacti.net/documentation.php

If it is all fully installed, you can normally get to cacti on

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[QUOTE=centosboy;4010672]I'm really not good at installing from the terminal, so I actually installed all 3 - nagios, MRTG and cacti from synaptic. Does synaptic do the full installation including setting up SQL databases, etc.?
Surprisingly when I type in cacti at the terminal, it says I even tried "cacti --help" but no luck.
MRTG on the other hand says so I really don't know

I went through the documentation on cacti you sent, but am a bit confused, 'cos cacti is already installed on my PC (as are nagios and MRTG).

What I don't understand is, if these apps are installed through synaptic or "apt-get install", how do I access/load them? they don't seem to be appearing in the main menu.
As for loading cacti with the URL you sent, any idea what I'm supposed to replace "yourserver" with? I tried 127.0.0.1 but no luck. I tried replacing "yourserver" with localhost but when the "/cacti" is there I get a "404 Not Found" and if I just say "http://localhost/" it says

[QUOTE=fkasmani;4011136]

read the documentation.
if you have problems understanding, then you can always run the cacti vmx which is a vmware image that is already mostly configured.
all you would have to do here is install the free vmware player or vmware server and then load the vmx image.