Monitoring inbound and outbound internet traffic
Solution 1
I personally use vnstat which works quite nicely as it just sits in the background. You can query it for hourly, daily, monthy stats and there's a nice web based frontend to it called jvnstat.
Here's some examples from my website:-
alan@bishop:~$ vnstat -m
eth0 / monthly
month rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
Dec '09 10.05 GiB | 38.33 GiB | 48.38 GiB | 151.54 kbit/s
Jan '10 10.83 GiB | 50.71 GiB | 61.55 GiB | 192.76 kbit/s
Feb '10 8.18 GiB | 63.24 GiB | 71.42 GiB | 247.65 kbit/s
Mar '10 10.43 GiB | 93.92 GiB | 104.35 GiB | 326.83 kbit/s
Apr '10 12.56 GiB | 85.59 GiB | 98.15 GiB | 317.63 kbit/s
May '10 12.70 GiB | 94.37 GiB | 107.07 GiB | 335.35 kbit/s
Jun '10 17.02 GiB | 95.04 GiB | 112.06 GiB | 362.66 kbit/s
Jul '10 33.18 GiB | 177.08 GiB | 210.26 GiB | 658.52 kbit/s
Aug '10 25.52 GiB | 37.25 GiB | 62.77 GiB | 196.60 kbit/s
Sep '10 20.70 GiB | 55.09 GiB | 75.79 GiB | 245.29 kbit/s
Oct '10 16.96 GiB | 60.15 GiB | 77.12 GiB | 241.52 kbit/s
Nov '10 23.97 GiB | 72.45 GiB | 96.41 GiB | 502.29 kbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
estimated 38.58 GiB | 116.62 GiB | 155.20 GiB |
alan@bishop:~$ vnstat -h
eth0 15:16
^ t
| t
| t
| t rt
| t rt rt
| t t rt rt
| t t t rt rt rt t
| t t t t t t t t t rt rt rt t
| rt t t t t t t t t rt rt rt rt rt
| rt rt rt rt rt rt rt r rt rt rt r rt r r r r rt rt rt rt rt rt
-+--------------------------------------------------------------------------->
| 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
h rx (KiB) tx (KiB) h rx (KiB) tx (KiB) h rx (KiB) tx (KiB)
16 37374 32892 00 28233 90548 08 29588 18472
17 55325 148496 01 27162 32413 09 44442 48771
18 37293 23266 02 23543 75628 10 60487 111111
19 28184 79542 03 26526 9882 11 143143 177348
20 27952 75414 04 28217 76025 12 108370 100327
21 28963 78342 05 26732 9255 13 173459 227965
22 29337 118592 06 26586 13474 14 48390 110247
23 27454 15529 07 26874 11389 15 10813 8882
vnstat is in the repositories and takes just a moment to setup. There's a nice guide on the debian administration website:-
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/330
Solution 2
Network analyser tools:
- I suggest you install wireshark and read its documentation.
Solution 3
I suggest you to install iptraf commandline tool.
Solution 4
speedometer
If you need a live monitoring of the inbound and outbound traffic rate across a network interface you can try speedometer. I found this command-line based tool very user-friendly.
Install speedometer:
sudo apt-get install speedometer
Use the -rx
and -tx
options to display bytes received and transmitted on network interface. For example, if your network interface card name is eth0
use the following command:
speedometer -rx eth0 -tx eth0
A live graph like the one shown blow will be displayed in the terminal window. By default, the graph is updated every second. You can change update intervals if you wish.
For more information read the man pages using man speedometer
after installing.
Solution 5
That is a question requiring a very nontrivial answer. The following tools could all be useful to deflect an attack:
nmap -A
netstat -lnptu
kill
the /proc filesystem
iptables
the sentry tools suite
These tools give you a lot of control if you know how to use them and will require some good "hobby time" to learn.
Related videos on Youtube
gijoemike
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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gijoemike over 1 year
Is there software I can install to enable me to monitor inbound and outbound internet traffic for security reasons?
I recently installed ubuntu and loving it because of speed and interface. I want to do what I can to make this the greatest OS I've ever worked with. Can you provide suggestions as to what I should install or do?
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Admin over 13 yearsHi @gijoemike and welcome to Ask Ubuntu! We find on here that it works best if you keep can keep it to one specific question per question. For this reason I've edited your question to only ask about the traffic monitoring issue. We'd love it if you opened a new question to ask about the changes to your files.
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Iulius Curt over 11 yearsCute little ASCII graphic :)
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Iulius Curt over 11 yearsI think
bmon
only shows real-time statistics