Hi Ed,

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008 08:47:47 -0500
"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:

>
> There are literally hundreds of tools that do exactly that, many of
> them open source. However, as the saying goes, "With great power
> comes great responsibility."

that's scary ;-)

> 1. You haven't specified what "all" means. Is it all the traffic in
> and out of one specific host, all the traffic in an enterprise, etc.?
> The more network segments you care about, the tougher the job becomes
> and the bigger the risks are.

>> whatever network(s) is/are active at the time
^^^^^^^^^

Yes, definitely wrong choice of words. Network adapter would have been
more appropriate.

>
> 2. There are, in addition to hundreds of tools, hundreds -- no,
> millions -- of privacy and security concerns associated with network
> monitoring.

I'm not interested in what the packets contain, just how many packets
are passing across the network adapter (NIC).
ie a download/upload rate. Regardless of what protocol is involved (FTP
or HTTP etc).

For example, I'm downloading Ubuntu updates as we speak and suspect its
going a tad slowly. Because I have this mail window maximized I can't
see Update Managers dialog so can't see the Download Rate (18.2Kb/sec
by the way. Which *is* slow ;-().

What I'd eventually like is (both of these would be applets on a gnome
panel for eg):

1 - to have something similar to the System Monitors CPU History graph,
but showing download speed.

or

2 - even just '18.2Kb/s' displayed on the panel (updates at a specified
refresh rate). Much like a temperature applet displays 17 degrees C
for eg.


sorry for the inaccuracy,


--
Mark