A Blog by Tim Bishop

I recently found a neat little tool whilst looking for applications that link against libstatgrab. It’s called bwm-ng and is written by a guy called Volker Gropp. The tool itself isn’t anything revolutionary (it’s influenced by the original bwm tool), it’s just a handy way of displaying current bandwidth usage across multiple interfaces.

This screenshot shows bwm-ng in action on my FreeBSD router.

It has a bunch of input methods to make it more portable, including libstatgrab which in theory might make it work on Windows. The default output method is the curses interface as shown in the above screenshot, but it’ll also do various textual formats including HTML.

The bwm-ng website gives links to a whole bunch of pre-packaged builds for various Linux distributions, and I’ve recently added it to the FreeBSD ports collection. Building from source is trivial too. 

I’m always on the lookout for handy little tools like this that just give you the raw facts in a simple and easily digested format. And it’s even better when they make use of libstatgrab

Related posts:

1. Finding the time It seems I’ve never got enough time these days. I’m a FreeBSD ports committer, but recently I’ve hardly done anything. All I’ve managed to do is keep my own ports updated. It’s quite frustrating because I want to be more involved. Then there’s the other projects like libstatgrab, they don’t even get a look in. I blame [...]...
2. A new libstatgrab release We’ve finally done another libstatgrab release. It’s been the best part of 8 months since the last release. Given the length of time you might be mistaken for thinking we’ve made lots of changes, but we haven’t. All this release really includes is some mostly untested Windows support, and handful of bugfixes. I guess the problem is that [...]...
3. Dovecot is a neat piece of software For many years now (since before I started working at the University) we’ve been using University of Washington’s IMAP and POP daemons. They worked well, and (through an old bit of unsupported code) also allowed our MH users to access their email. As time went on people wanted to do more than UW’s software could offer. [...]...
4. Streaming music around my home This weekend I thought I’d have a go at setting up SlimServer, an application that streams music to various audio devices. It’s primarily design to work with the SqueezeBox, a hardware device that can wirelessly stream the music, but there are various bits of software that can use it too. The server itself was a doddle [...]...

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 12:59 am and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.