[afnog] - mrtg bandwidth measurement

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 04:22:19PM +0300,
 Habib Mohammedaman <habibhma at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 48 lines which said:

> our network connection is coming through a cisco router and then directly to
> a linux box which is our firewall and gateway i do have mrtg on it and try
> to see the NIC activities . But i wana try to know the bandwidth that we r
> getting on the linux interface on the linux the exact bandwith that the
> ISPgive us .

The last sentence is not really clear. You can install a SNMP agent on
the Linux box (net-snmp, for instance) and direct MRTG at it. You will
get the actual throughput (bandwidth is not the proper word) on the
NIC.

Knowing the throughput on the link to the Internet (which may be
different if there are other machines besides the Linux box or if the
Cisco chats with pals on the Internet) indeed requires access to the
Cisco (if I understand your setup). 

> i am doing this b/c here the cisco router are not in our authority.

Managing a local network when the last router is not under your
authority is extremely challenging, to say the least. May be the
people who manage the router may give you a SNMP read access? It would
be quite sufficient for MRTG.