iptotal howto for FREESCO 0.2.7

This page will describe the installation and use of the iptotal package for FREESCO 0.2.7.
Go here if you are looking for the howto page for the iptotal package for FREESCO 0.3.x

The iptotal package is a network usage monitor without the need for an SNMP daemon.
It is based on an *extremely* simple network sniffer using the libpcap library.
I have developed this tool because the numbers reported by the SNMP daemon on my FREESCO box where way too low (about 3 to 5 times too low).

Requirements

A hard disk based FREESCO router (sorry no floppy support...)
preferable a Pentium based FREESCO box (the CPU load for the runtime generated graphs is rather high).
the utils-1 and utils-2 package (but who hasn't installed these?)
the RRDTool package for FREESCO
an HTTP server with CGI support (NOTE: the standard FREESCO httpd daemon is too old, you'll have to upgrade to at least thttpd 2.20 or Apache)
A human (preferably...) sysadmin to do the install + configuration
A little time.

Package installation

The screenshot below shows a sample installation from my server.

[Linux]installpkg http://dingetje.homeip.net/packages/iptotal
Now downloading the install script for iptotal...
Warning: installing software from a 3rd party package could damage your
router's configuration or make it insecure. You should only install a
package from an author/site you trust.
http://dingetje.homeip.net/packages/iptotal.sh (1K)
iptotal.sh [########################] 1K | 438.96K/s
1179 bytes transferred in 0.00 sec (246.39k/sec)
Do you want to view the install script before executing it [y/n]? n
Continue installing [y/n]? y
http://dingetje.homeip.net/packages/iptotal.tgz (54K)
iptotal.tgz [########################] 54K | 667.37K/s
55325 bytes transferred in 0.08 sec (659.65k/sec)
Starting iptotal network monitor... Done

Installation is complete.
Now you can use - iptotal
Usage graph is at http://your.freesco.ip/iptotal/iptotal.cgi

If you use Apache you'll have to follow the procedure described in this FAQ. For some thttpd versions it may also be required to add CGI access to the iptotal directory. Refer to the man page for thttpd here or FAQ here for details.

Usage

After the installation you should wait a few minutes to allow the tool to create the initial database and capture the first few samples.
Then point your favorite browser to http://your.freesco.ip/iptotal/iptotal.cgi
A page similar to this one should appear. It will take a full day to fill the entire graph.
Verify the measured values by performing a download of a big file (several Mb) on one of the clients behind your FREESCO box.

The package is controlled in the familiar way:

rc_iptotal [ start | stop ]

When iptotal is executing is will update the RRD database in /mnt/router/packages/iptotal/dbase/iptotal.rrd
This database should allow read access to user nobody which is the default user your HTTP server is running with.
The process ID is written to /var/run/iptotal.pid The monitored network interface is default eth0
If you want to change this then edit /mnt/router/packages/iptotal/etc/iptotal.cfg
When the RRD database location is changed, you will also have to change the graph display script in /www/iptotal/iptotal.cgi
The created graph images will be written at /www/iptotal/images
This graph directory should be owned by the same user that is running your HTTP daemon (usually nobody).

Enjoy ;-)

Non FREESCO

The iptotal binary (the measurement program) should be portable to other Linux/Un*x based systems with little effort.
The only requirement is the libcap library (see above). If you want the graph generation, you'll need Tobi Oetiker's
rrdtool package (for home page click the RRDTOOL logo above).
For the archive CGI script, Perl 5.0 or better is required, which is installed by default on most modern linux distro's
these days.

The full package including sources can be downloaded here: iptotal-0.3.tar.gz

README

CHANGELOG

INSTALL

Tha....tha....that's all folks!

written by dingetje for FREESCO

Last edited: Jul 10, 2003