BW Acct tracks and reports on bandwidth usage.
One of the most significant advantages of BW Acct is its support for multiple RDBMS, providing greater versatility by accommodating various databases. Additionally, this software features a plugin architecture, allowing you to extend BW Acct to support other databases, making it even more flexible to meet your specific needs.
Furthermore, BW Acct is highly accurate when it comes to accounting for firewall rules, allowing for precise bandwidth usage monitoring. It operates in the background, monitoring a database for updates and managing firewall rules based on those changes. What's more, these rules are inserted before any other rules in the standard netfilter chains, enabling accounting to be processed before any other rules take effect.
For example, BW Acct can account for all ICMP traffic received by the system, even if a later rule drops some of this traffic, greatly enhancing the accuracy of the collected data. Also, its quick setup feature makes it fast and straightforward to install.
To build BW Acct, simply extract the bwacct tarball, then read the README in the source directory to guide you through the process. Once completed, build either the sqlite or mysql database plugin, depending on your preferences.
With a few simple commands, you can quickly set up the software on your system. You can choose between sqlite and mysql database plugins, depending on your needs. Quick setup instructions are provided for sqlite, including creating the directory /bwacct, creating a database subdirectory, and modifying the path for accounting.db in the bwacct configuration file.
In this latest release, BW Acct fixed a signed 16-bit integer overflow on table ID, making it even more stable, reliable, and accurate. All in all, BW Acct is an essential software for accurate bandwidth accounting and reporting.
Version 2.10.4: N/A