WMnet 1.06 review

WMnet is a little WindowMaker dockapp network monitor I wrote for Linux. It was originally inspired by that funky program 'tleds'

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 26K Developer: Jesse B. Off and Katharine Osborne

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WMnet is a little WindowMaker dockapp network monitor I wrote for Linux.

It was originally inspired by that funky program 'tleds' that blinks your keyboard LED's in response to net traffic, but its a lot more entertaining than that nowadays.

I wrote this thing with low cpusage, low memory, and efficient use of screen real-estate in mind.

This little program polls network statistics and does a few things with the data it gets. It has small blinking lights for the rx and tx of IP packets, a digital speedometer of your polled stat's current speed and a bar graph like xload et. al which has a tx speed graph from bottom-up and rx speed graph from the top-down.

The speedometer keeps track of the current speed per second and shows it in a color corresponding to which of rx or tx that has the highest speed at the moment. Also, the graph is drawn in a way that the highest speed is drawn on top of the other while the other is in the background. Depending on whether you are running ppp or ethernet
connections, you should set the -x parameter to about 1.5 times the high speed of your connection... the default is 6000 which will be stupid if you're on a ethernet line with a max of about 800 kb/sec.

I've found the best for an ethernet line is '-x 10000000 -l' Having the logarithmic scale lets you see any speed of traffic from a telnet session to downloadeding something from across the hall at 600 kb/sec.

I tried to keep this is as small and efficient as possible CPU time on my K5 PR100 with the default poll time of 25000 microseconds (1 microsecond == 1 millionth of a second.) is less than 20 seconds per 24 hours Which is less than even wmmixer uses for me.

wmnet now uses drivers to get stats. The existing stat driver from previous versions has been moved to the ipfwadm driver. To get some generic IP accounting rules using ipfwadm:

ipfwadm -A in -i -S 0.0.0.0/0
ipfwadm -A out -i -D 0.0.0.0/0