[colug-432] tracking WAN data usage

[Rick Hornsby]

My ISP does not currently have a per month data limit, and does not provide
us with any usage stats as such. However, with all the nonsense coming out
of Comcast and AT&T (including the stories of being charged for grossly
over-inflated data usage), it's got me curious about my own usage. What
does my usage look like now, and if I found myself in a monopoly setting
where there was only one residential ISP, and they had usage caps - how
would I measure it for myself?

As has been pointed out in these over-charging stories, unlike your
electric meter or your gas meter which is subject to the jurisdiction of a
PUCO type government body, there's absolutely no accountability or
transparency stopping Comcast from just making up a number - or being wrong
and trying to charge you for something you didn't use anyway.

I have pfSense as my home router, and I have the ntop package running but
I'm finding a couple of challenges with it -

* Any configuration changes to ntop reset all the statistics back to zero
(There's an option for keeping historical data, but it seems clear from the
UI that this should not be turned on.)
* While I definitely like some of the detail (which I don't understand
yet), I'm having a hard time figuring out where the overall data used
number might be

I have an extra pi, I was thinking of maybe having pfSense ship the stats
to that. Is there a better tool than ntop? Even if the only stats I got
were total data used, and maybe total (WAN?) data used by device - I think
that might be good enough.

thanks!
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