Bandwidth Issues, Advice needed

[Detonate]

I got a pop-up in my browser today with a message from CenturyLink, my DSL provider that I have exceeded the amount of band width I am authorized and if it keeps happening I might lose my service. I currently have a 12Mbps connection and I am authorized 250 GB per month. Downloads only, they don't count uploads. My usage in the past billing period was 856 GB. It has been steadily increasing since February when it was only 150 GB. I don't know what is causing this huge usage. I currently have five computers and two other devices on my LAN that have internet access. How can I monitor my network to see which device is using up all of this huge amount of bandwidth? DSL is the only service available here with that much speed and with reliability.

I have three gamers with Windows on my network, plus a Wii and Roku box that are used for Netflix and MLB.TV. I need to isolate where all of this bandwidth is going.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04

http://qwest.centurylink.com/internethelp/eup.html

and the FAQ.

http://qwest.centurylink.com/internethelp/pdf/EUP.pdf

[claydoh]

Ouch, bandwidth caps suck, I am lucky to have never had one the 10+ years I had it.
I suspect netflix, etc as a possible culprit to start looking at. A single movie depending on quality can range from 1.5 to 3.5 gb each, i think a good average is approx 1gb per hour of video. So 2 hours a day of streaming video (split among all users) total is 60 gb. Imagine if each user was watching 2 hours each?

Then there is always filesharing to consider.

knemo or etherape are 2 of many choices for monitoring traffic, and there is a netspeed widget you can try installing from the add-plasma-widgets dialogs, but the kde-apps site where it would be seems to be down.

You also might want to see what your router might provide for tools, it might have something built in

[SteveRiley]

CenturyLink, of all outfits, should not be foisting bandwidth caps on people. Thousands of miles of dark fiber lace Colorado, which CL got when they took over Qwest. Why won't they light some of that up? Grrrrrrrr!

[Detonate]

We use Netflix a lot, but the usage has not changed recently. We were using it about the same amount back when my usage was running about 150 GB monthly. I don't know of any file sharing going on. And as I said, they only count downloads, not uploads. I installed etherape last night, and I am going to let it run for a while and see if I can identify what is happening.

[Detonate]

One thing I wonder about is MLB.TV. I watch a game almost every day, streamed in HD of course. And baseball season started in April, and that's when my usage started climbing.

[whatthefunk]

Ive got data caps on my connection as well. I use a program called Network Traffic Monitor (NTM) to keep track of my usage. I doesnt tell me what programs are accessing the connection but allows me to set caps and have it cut off the connection before I exceed my limit. Its not the greatest program, but it works.
http://netramon.sourceforge.net/eng/index.html

Its not in the repos, but you can download a .deb file by following the link.

EDIT: Some other things that Ive never used but that might help you:

awn-applet-bandwidth-monitor - Display information from network
bmon - portable bandwidth monitor and rate estimator
bwm-ng - small and simple console-based bandwidth monitor
netams - network traffic accounting and monitoring daemon
nload - realtime console network usage monitor

[rms]

Network Management applet also shows bandwith usage for the current session so, after after every game you watch at MLB.TV you can see how much it burned.

[lcorken]

I have an old conky file that shows totalup and totaldown.

Conky gets this info from somewhere so if you could figure out where you may be
able to get it some other way if you don't want to dive into the deep dark
abyss of conky stuff.

Total Upload ${totalup eth0}
Total Download ${totaldown eth0}
//Change eth0 to wlan0 on wireless

There may be limitations: http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html
"Total download, overflows at 4 GB on Linux with 32-bit arch and there doesn't
seem to be a way to know how many times it has already done that before conky
has started."

Ken.

[Detonate]

I'm trying out all of these suggestions, but most of these apps only look at the device they are installed on, and I need something that looks at every device on the network. So far, etherape seems to be the best at this. One of the things I have to do is determine what device is which on my LAN. As most of them use DHCP, their IP address can change every time they log out and back in. But I think I know a way to lock them to a specific IP address without having them set up static IP's which I can't do with some of the devices anyway.

[Detonate]

I just ran five hours of streaming radio and only used 86 MB. We'll see what happens tonight when I watch the Braves and the Marlins on MLB.TV

[whatthefunk]

Update:
I just found a native KDE program called KNemo that does a pretty excellent job of monitoring your network traffic. Its in the repos.

[Detonate]

Thanks, I will try that. My issues seem to have resolved themselves. Total mystery as what was causing them.