Network Traffic Accounting

After totally automating my Mobitel 3G connection, the next natural step was to setup some kind of a traffic accounting system. I wanted to avoid tools that monitor individual packets, because that was an unnecessary overhead. vnStat turned out to be a perfect match.

Here are the steps in setting up vnstat on Debian. Good news is that vnstat in Debian comes with proper crontab entries and network up/down hooks already in place.

• First step, obviously is to install vnstat:

  # apt-get install vnstat
  

• Create a new configuration:

  # vnstat --showconfig > /etc/vnstat.conf
  

• Edit /etc/vnstat.conf and set the default interface to "ppp0".
• Create an empty database for ppp0:

  # vnstat -u -i ppp0
  

Now vnstat starts counting network traffic. The default crontab seems to run "vnstat -u" every 5 minutes.

Then I installed this simple web based frontend called vnStat PHP frontend. Installation is just a matter of unpacking:

# cd /usr/local/src/
# wget http://www.sqweek.com/sqweek/files/vnstat_php_frontend-1.3.tar.gz
# cd /var/www
# tar -xzvf /usr/local/src/vnstat_php_frontend-1.3.tar.gz
# mv vnstat_php_frontend-1.3 vnstat

Then I had to edit /var/www/vnstat/config.php and set the following values.

$iface_list          = array('ppp0');
$iface_title['ppp0'] = 'Mobitel 3G';
$vnstat_bin          = '/usr/bin/vnstat';

Pointing a browser to http://localhost/vmstat/ showed that everything is working fine.

I also have the following .htaccess file in vnstat directory to avoid access from remote hosts:

Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128