This utility could be handy in a limited bandwidth WAN environment (frame relay, ISDN etc. circuits) to pinpoint offending traffic source if certain links become saturated to the point where legitimate packets start getting dropped.
It also can be used to monitor internet connection when specifying the range of local ip addresses (to avoid firing reports about non-local networks).
Bandwidth is defined as total size in kBytes of the layer 2 frames with IP packets passing the specified interface during the avaraging period devided by the number of seconds in that period.
There can be many ip-ranges separate by colons. No spaces may appear in the argument. Each ip-range can be either a single ip address such as 192.168.1.1 which indicates a range of one, a partial ip address such as 192.168.1.0 which indicates a range from 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.255, a low and high ip address separated by a hypen (-), and a single ip address, a slash (/) and an integer between 0 and 32 (a "net address") which indicates a network. If you run ipband with the debug option (-d) the program will print the entire list of ip ranges, so you can check their values.
Here is a list of arguments to -L along with the corresponding range.
COMMAND: ipband eth0 -l 137.99.11
RANGE: 137.99.11.0-137.99.11.255
COMMAND: ipband eth0 -L 137.99.11:127.0.5/23
RANGE: 137.99.11.0-137.99.11.255,127.0.4.0-127.0.5.255
COMMAND: ipband eth0 -L 127.1.5.17-127.1.7.131
RANGE: 127.1.5.17-127.1.7.131
The options in the config file are specified by keyword/value pairs. Lines starting with # are ignored.
Below is a list of config file options:
Will capture packets from/to ip addresses matching 10.10.0.0/255.255.0.0, tally traffic by the third octet,calculate bandwidth utilization every 5 minutes and report per host traffic every 15 minutes.
Read configuration from file ipband.conf.