On Friday 17 Apr 2009, Dr. Sharukh K. R. Pavri. wrote:
I am using MTNL's Triband combo offer which gives 600 mb download a month. This has been upped from 400 mb just last month.
It is quite likely there is a glitch in the MTNL billing system. I just got my bill yesterday for March. Starting from March, I had switched to the 512 Kbps unlimited plan in which the CPE rental of Rs. 50 is waived. Yet, lo behold there is a line item for CPE rental Rs. 50!
Their punch line "MTNL hai to sahi hai."
I usually run a check with knetworkmonitor and gkrellm and there would always be a small discrepancy between the usage shown on my machine and that shown by mtnl, where mtnl would always show slightly lower usage than on my machine.
You can capture the total packet traffic on eth0 from the output of ifconfig when you reboot/poweroff
<transcript> ifconfig eth0 eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1F:D0:E9:15:61 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:10488 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:9436 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:10218799 (9.7 Mb) TX bytes:1105652 (1.0 Mb) Interrupt:252 Base address:0xc000 <transcript>
Capture the line RX bytes and TX bytes into a table and sum it up at the end of the month for your totals. (write a shell script and include it in the shutdown/reboot process)
HTH, Arun Khan