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We have a Linux router which firewalls incoming traffic, while allowing the 300+ hosts on our local network to make outgoing connections to the Internet.

I suspect that a few "bandwidth hogs" may be consuming far more than their share, and degrading the experience for the other users. I would like to make some measurements on the Linux router to determine if that is true.

I've Googled for bandwidth usage monitoring tools, and found a bunch of tools which can measure bandwidth usage "by IP". But I suspect this means the destination IP, not the source IP. I don't care about the remote IPs -- I just want to know which IPs (or better yet, MAC addresses) on the local network are consuming the most bandwidth.

Is there a freely available program for Linux which can help?

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    What OS on the router? Some router-specific OS or server OS? Also please mention the tools that don't suit your needs.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Jul 4, 2014 at 3:20

3 Answers 3

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ntop may give you what you're looking for.

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  • Indeed, ntop was able to identify the "bandwidth hogs". Thanks for pointing out a great tool.
    – Alex D
    Jul 4, 2014 at 9:18
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If you want to have a visual, real-time display, you might want to use EtherApe. Big nodes = big consumers:

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NetHogs might work here - I'd start it up in screen, and switch over to total mode

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Iptraf would work here - its interactive mode shows TCP traffic only

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but its logs seem to include this sort of information in detail

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