[mrtg] Doubts on traffic monitoring

[Marco De Vitis]

Hello,
I'd like to use MRTG to see how much Internet traffic is going through 
our ADSL router, a RAD LA-140. I'm forced to use a Win98 machine as 
monitoring client.

I followed the guide, and everything went smoothly, but I have some 
questions to understand if everything is working as it should.

First of all, a very general question: I'm interested in knowing how 
much data do we download each day, on average. But MRTG graphs show 
max/avg/current values for bandwith usage, in bytes per second; does 
this mean that, if I want to know how many bytes we download each day on 
average, I can multiply the MRTG average value for 60 (to get 
bytes/minute), then for 60 again (to get bytes/hour), then for 24 (to 
get bytes/day)? Is this the right thing to do for my need? (please put 
aside the fact that I can directly multiply for 86400, of course ;))

Then comes the real question.
We have no access to the router config and features, we have not even 
been given a manual. Luckily, CFGMAKER was able to access it without 
particular problems. The strange fact is that CFGMAKER found TWO 
interfaces, with the following ifTypes:

interface 2, ifType: ethernetCsmacd (6)
interface 102, ifType: Asymetric Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL) (94)

I would expect my interface of interest to be the number 102, but its 
graphs show absolutely nothing! Zero traffic. I also tried raising the 
MaxBytes parameter to huge values.

Interface 2, instead, shows some ingoing and outgoing traffic. Anyway I 
didn't notice a real match between the graphs and the activity... the 
bytes/s values were always very low, hundreds or few thousands of 
bytes/s, even when I was downloading at 100 kbytes/s, and sometimes they 
didn't even change.
I'm afraid this could be the intranet traffic... is it possible? Anyway, 
I didn't notice any match with it, either: I tried running MRTG once, 
then transferring lots of data between PCs, then running MRTG again, and 
nothing changed. I would not expect the values to change, after all, as 
the intranet traffic should NOT reach the router, as it is rerouted by 
the various switches before reaching it... right?

Maybe there's another possibility: that router also routes VOICE 
traffic; the digital phone lines pass through it. So... maybe I'm now 
monitoring voice traffic?? Is it possible?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, I really need them.

Ciao,
  Marco.
-- 
..."Stupid Dream", Porcupine Tree 1999

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