Network Monitoring with Linux ?

Monitoring network interface & bandwidth of your internet connection is critical these days as many Computer Users have fixed & dial up connections. 

                                           People catch up with internet more often than ever, so knowing your current internet speed, transfer rate  & estimated download time might be critical to some of them.

                                       In Linux there're bunch of applications which provide the necessary functionality in order to do this. But, installation of these tools can be tricky as usual, like any other Linux Based Application.

                      Speedometer is the application which will ultimately be explained in this note of this humble blog site of mine. Speedometer caught my attention when I was having some information hunting about tools to check my internet speed, which wavers most of the time. This guide is in simple steps, so you can follow them with ease.

Step 01: RunYour Terminal & Type the following Command in it.

$ python -V

The purpose of this command is to make sure you've installed the required python version to run the application.


Step 02:  After making sure you've got Python (Python Comes with Linux Installation), you've to download Python-Urwid package, in order to do that. type:

$ sudo apt-get install python-urwid

Step 03:  Download Speedometer.py source file, here, & run the following Command in your terminal, to copy the source file to /usr/local/bin/ .

$ sudo cp speedometer.py /usr/local/bin/speedometer

Make sure to go inside the downloaded directory before performing the above step.


Step 04:  Run the following command to grant permission to run the application to specific user.

$ sudo chown username /usr/local/bin/speedometer

Step 05:  Run the following command to give access permissions to the speedometer file to run in line with the system.

$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/speedometer

Step 06: Run man command to test your application works fine & its other options along side with  manual.

$ man speedometer

Step 07:  If you're done. Then, You can check your application. Here's some example commands to test the application.

$ speedometer 1 -rx eth0

It returns the following graph with dynamic values to exit any time press 'Esc'.

This command is in the $ speedometer time-interval-in-seconds -rx network-interface format.