I need a bandwidth alarm tool that works

because i have one now that doesn't

[sandyeggo]

Someone has been sucking up some bandwidth on our site for about 10 weeks now , In a one hour period of a day, my bandwidth can triple. Yesterday I served 1GB in an hour, when we normally serve 400MB. These spikes have a pattern too - they only happen in a single hour period of a day, and the times vary. They spike 2 days in a row, then off for 2 days in a row - it must be on some type of cron job (however it did take off on christmas day :-) - maybe its a Union script? ;-) )

The traffic is not web traffic - it is not in any of our logs, and it does not affect awstats statistics at all. The only way to see what is going on is to sniff the traffic as it passes through live.

I installed a script called bandwidth alarm, and we had high hopes. However its not working for us - the alarms are not tripping. The program says it is running, we try to trip it, but it wont. What we wanted it to do was notify us if the bandwidth spiked, and it would also trip a logging feature that we would later be able to examine with Ethereal. This is ultimately what we want to do so we can see what is going on on the server during a spike.

Does anyone have another script that they know of, or any help or ideas that you can provide that might help point us in the right direction?
Thanks

[andye]

Maybe your host can do something at the router level?

hth, a.

[Pfui]

Bandwidth Alarm [bytemark.co.uk] certainly does sound like it would be very useful. Was creator Matthew Bloch unable to help you?

[sandyeggo]

i saw that on freshmeat that he had not logged in for sometime, so i drew the conclusion that maybe he wasnt supporting further - however since he does run his own hosting company i am sure he's still around. I found his email address so i will email him to see what he says.

[Citrus]

I notice that you are using awstats.
Have you got the latest version because I understand there is a loophole in older versions that spammers exploit to send mail through which could explain your bandwidth problem.
Another culprit is an older version of oscommerce which has a similar problem.
This can be spotted in your mailogs.
All my sites are being probed by bots at the momment looking for awstats.