Index of /Server/Bandwidth/bwbar

	Name	Last modified	Size	Description
	Parent Directory		-
	normal_restart	2002-10-27 12:56	501
	total_restart	2002-11-10 10:04	604
	Makefile	2002-07-08 13:42	761
	bwbar_config	2007-10-05 15:10	2.5K
	bwbar.c	2006-05-23 06:20	11K
	bwbar	2006-05-23 06:20	14K

This modified version of the program was created by Brian Towne. The modified version is available at: http://www.mythica.org/bwbar/.

INSTALLATION

1. Using a text editor (pico, vi, etc.), read the bwbar_config file and edit it as is suggested within the file.

2. From your shell, type the following command:


./total_restart

3. Point your web browser to the location of the bandwidth directory on your web site (This is dependent on what you entered in the bwbar_config file).

That's it!

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

When to run ./total_restart instead of ./normal_restart:

If you run ./total_restart instead of ./normal_restart, the "Total bandwidth usage is" line will be reset to 0 and the "Bandwidth logging was started at" line will be reset to the current time. I like to keep track of my bandwidth on a monthly basis, so I run ./total_restart once per month. You can do this automatically using cron by entering the following command:
crontab -e

Then add the following line:

0 0 1 * * cd /PATH_TO/bwbar/; ./total_restart > /dev/null

(Change "PATH_TO" to the path to your bwbar/ directory, of course.)

This will run total_restart automatically on the first minute of the first day of each month.

total_restart and normal_restart MUST be run from WITHIN the bwbar directory as they use non-absolute locations to make configuration easier.

Restarting the program automatically when the server reboots:

You can also use cron to restart the program automatically when the server reboots. To do this, enter the following command:
crontab -e

Then add the following line:

@reboot cd /PATH_TO/bwbar/; ./normal_restart > /dev/null

PROBLEMS

"Logging was started at:" and "Current server time is:" lines are blank

This is likely because your HTTP server isn't parsing the server-side includes (SSI) in the HTML file. Some Apache installations are configured to only parse SSI in files with .shtml extensions. If you think this is the case, try changing the INDEX_FILENAME parameter to 'index.shtml' and restart the program.

VALUES USED FOR BWBAR'S CALCULATIONS

We use these values for our calculations:

1000000 bits (b) = 1000 kilobits (kb) = 1 megabit (Mb)
1000000 bytes (B) = 1000 kilobytes (kB) = 1 megabyte (MB)

The first value is widely accepted; the second value, however, is a source of great dispute. Because the SI prefix kilo means 10^3 (1000) and NOT 2^10 (1024), I feel that we are being correct in our calculations.

Also note that the 'k' in the abbreviation for kilobytes is in lower-case, while the 'M' in the abbreviation for megabits is in upper-case. This is also correct: the SI prefix 'k' is always lower-case, while larger prefixes are upper-case: M, G, T, etc.

References:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

COMMENTS

This program is released under the GPL. See the bwbar.c file for details.

I'd like to request that people NOT remove the "This program is generated by bwbar." line from their output. There's obviously nothing that I can do if you do decide to remove the line, but I'd appreciate it if people would at least preserve the link to http://www.mythica.org/bwbar/ so that other people who are interested can find and download the program for themselves. Thanks.

	bwbar 1.0 by H. Peter Anvin 

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/web/bwbar/
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/web/bwbar/

bwbar is a small program that generates a text and a graphical readout
of the current bandwidth use.  It is currently for Linux only.

It is used, among others, at http://www.kernel.org/.

To set it up, create a script that contains the following commands:

#!/bin/sh -
cd /home/httpd/html/ubar
bwbar eth0 1.5 &

... assuming you are connected to the Internet via the interface
"eth0", you are on a 1.5 Mbit/s link, and you want the output files in
the directory /home/httpd/html/ubar.

This will create two files named "ubar.txt", a text fragment, and a
PNG graphic named "ubar.png".  These can be included in an SHTML web
page using the following commands (or something like it):












In a PHP web page, you would instead do:











Some aspects of the bwbar command can be customized with options.  The
bwbar command has the following full usage description:

Usage: bwbar [options] interface max_mbps
Options: (defaults in parenthesis)
--input               -i   Measure input bandwidth
--output              -o   Measure output bandwidth (default)
--text-file     -f   The name of the text output file (ubar.txt)
--png-file      -g   The name of the graphical bar file (ubar.png)
--interval   -t   The poll interval in seconds (15)
--width       -x   Width of the graphical bar (600)
--height      -y   Height of the graphical bar (4)
--border      -b   Border width of the graphical bar (1)