kvolmet Manual

1. Introduction

The utility kvolmet is easy to use utility, designed for the intuitive visualisation of data volumes transferred between the internet and the user's computer. This manual explains briefly the key features and underlying ideas.

2. Requirements and installation

The program was developped and tested successfully under KDE 3.03 (SuSE 8.1). It should run under KDE 2.x also. The zlib is required and therefore needs to be installed on your system.

You can run kvolmet as any user. However, you need read permission for the logfiles of interest. As a regular user, you usually don't have read permission for (older) logfiles which are zipped. An alert box will tell you.

To build the program from the sources, save the archive to a place where you want to unpack it. Then do a

./configure
make
make install

That's it!

3. Settings

Rate
According to the agreement with your service provider, indicate here the upper limit of your rate as well as the amount due for each overdrawn Megabyte.

Billing Period
Please indicate here the starting day of the billing period. A period of one month is assumed (cannot be changed so far).

Logfile
Please indicate here the most recent logfile containing the log data to be exploited (e.g messages, localmessages). If the logfile you've chosen doesn't cover one complete year (which is probably the case), the program determines automatically the logfile(s) covering the missing period. Permitted logfile formats are text and zip.

The Regex field allows you to specify the format the log data is written. The format must be known to extract properly the parameters month, day, bytes sent, bytes receceived (captured by the round brackets). For most common distributions, the default expression holds. A sample line from a SuSE logfile reads like this:
Jan 10 12:37:19 linux pppd[1687]: Sent 39404 bytes, received 146535 bytes. (1)
So, the regular expression looks like:
(...) (.[0-9]).*: Sent ([0-9]+) bytes, received ([0-9]+) bytes.
For logfiles having a format different from (1), the regular expression must be set accordingly.

4. Usage

The GUI is rather intuitive and therefore does not need a lot of explanations, so just some hints. The data amount displayed takes into account also the traffic from the current session. Using the blue arrows, you can switch to the previous (the following) billing period. The connector button indicates if you are online or not. Clicking on the connector button, opens a realtime counter (clicking again closes it).

5. Principle mode of operation

For those interested how the program is working, here the principle steps which are executed:
- initialising of parameters
- determination of the logfiles needed to cover one year
- parsing these logfiles to filter out the lines of interest (those with sent/received information)
- filling a 2d array (rows: days, columns: months) with the number of transmitted bytes
This array then serves as the basis for all further analyses.

6. Acknowledgement

Special thanks to J. Lietzow, who contributed significantly to this project, and sourceforge for hosting it.



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