Re: Usage Monitoring and Bandwidth Allowance

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2010-10-31 at 09:13 +0000, Chris Baines wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been using the Network Manager applet for a while now, but I feel
> that it is missing some critical features. Firstly it has no way of
> recording usage and secondly it has no way of distributing bandwidth. 

Correct, usage recording is something we've wanted to do for a while but
not had enough time.  NM knows what interface the modem is using for
data, so we can track usage on it.  NM already tracks per-session PPP
data usage, but does not save it anywhere.  We'd also want to track
Ethernet data usage because some devices use ethernet interfaces for
data.

In the end, I figured that the best thing to do would just be to track
data for all connections.  We can get it through netlink signals, or
through polling the interface with various ioctls or
scraping /proc/net/dev (the ugly way).

Once this is done, my thought had been to have NM save this information
on a per-connection basis to an sqlite database
in /var/lib/NetworkManager, and then expose that data via the D-Bus
interface.  There's a bug on bugzilla.gnome.org that has more thoughts
on this, anybody want to look into it?

> The first one is similar to the functionality provided by the vnstat
> tool I use currently, but it would be good it either integrate similar
> functionality in to the Network Manager or make it a integrated gui for
> vnstat. 
> 
> The second idea I imagine is a little bit harder, but I hope you can see
> where I am going with it. Applications could be given percentage shares
> of the current network bandwidth, and/or minimum allowances. This would
> allow users to download at the same time as surfing as the download
> could be configured to just use the spare bandwidth. 

Yes, this is getting more into iptables though.  At this point i
honestly don't know much about bandwidth prioritization and iptables, so
if somebody wants to pick this up and run with it, that would be great.

Dan