Traffic Measurement Woes

Gil Romano (gil@quickcom.net)
Wed, 09 Oct 1996 23:39:58 -0700

Anybody know of a good solution to measure total bytes on an ethernet,
destined to or originating from any number of predetermined IP addresses. I
guess I'm thinking of a poor man's version of a packet sniffer that listens
to ALL packets on the Ethernet and keeps stats of total bytes transmitted to
or from whichever IP's I want to track (or all for total traffic).

The application would be measuring the bandwith utilization to or from a
router (livingston, of course :-) or to measure traffic volume coming from a
co-located web server and/or total bandwidth utilization on the ethernet
itself. Yes, I know the Livingstons have byte counters on the ports, but
you can't reset them without rebooting and you can't get total across all ports.

Anybody have a good solution for this problem that costs less than $30,000
as does Network General's "Network Sniffer" (I think that's what it's called
and that's what I was told it costs)...something running on a low end PC
would be nice, but I don't know if a regular ethernet card can do this.

------------------------------------------------------------
Gil Romano | email: gil@quickcom.net
|
QuickCom Internet Communications | http://www.quickcom.net
5724 West Third Street, Suite 507 | voice: (213) 634-7735
Los Angeles, CA 90036 | fax: (213) 634-7722
------------------------------------------------------------