Displaying bandwidth usage with Go
Programming Snapshot – Go Bandwidth Display
© Lead Image © xyzproject, 123RF.com
A Go program running on a Raspberry Pi grabs metrics from a pfSense firewall and displays them on a miniature display to help Mike Schilli keep an eye on his Internet connection's bandwidth usage.
Measuring the active throughput of an Internet connection is not entirely trivial, because nobody wants the measuring probe to slow down the data traffic. However, the router at the Internet access point has to view and forward all of the packets anyway, so why not let it also count them and provide the results via an API?
At home, I use a pfSense firewall on a fanless mini PC as my main router, which also runs some apps with access to the packet throughput (Figure 1). One of these apps is ntopng, which shows you in a browser which LAN client is currently communicating with which server on the Internet – among other things. Ntopng also offers an API with token authentication, which returns counters for the bits transferred in both directions.
I didn't want to rely on the tool just running on demand in a web browser, but on a separate Raspberry Pi, which I equipped with a $50 color display for continuous viewing pleasure (Figure 2). When I'm sitting at my desk, I can see out of the corner of my eye the number of bits zooming in or out every second. As a side effect, I can also see at a glance what's going on when someone shouts "the Internet is down again" from the other room.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.