Options for Metering my own Internet Usage ?

In response to Time Warner wanting to meter internet use, even though they seem to be "shelving" the idea for the time being, I would like to know how I can meter my own usage and see how much bandwidth I really use.

What kind of options are there ?

The software on many routers allows you to record your up/down bandwidth on a per-day/week/month basis. Check your router to see if you need to enable it.

There are also desktop applications that can handle the task. Since you're running Ubuntu, here's a Linux utility called bwmon:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bwmon/

and a similar Windows alternative:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemeter/

This page looks like it has a pretty decent list of other utilities:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/bandwidth-mon ... linux.html

I discovered it's possible to find out how much bandwidth has been used since the last reboot on Ubuntu by looking at the resources tab of the system monitor, but that's not too much help. Though, I did determine I used roughly 100MB each day over the last week using that and "/proc/uptime".

If that keeps up I would probably have little to worry about if Time Warner decided to turn on caps around here. I'm sure a nice chunk of that was the result of traffic behind my router.

I'm trying out bandwidthd on Ubuntu at the moment, it seems pretty simple, breaks traffic down by protocol, and has an entry in the package manager.

I like bandwidthd so far. I can have it running on one of my Ubuntu systems and it keeps track of the whole network.

Still looks like I'll be safe if they ever decide to introduce bandwidth caps in my area.