My net does still keep dying though, and I've got a major suspicion its to do with downloading programs that open lots of connections at once (bittorrent, imesh, gnutella). Is there any place in linux to look to see how many connections are currently being NATed? and then how to see which local ip address has the most. It's odd though, it seemed to work ok when I was with telecom, but then it all went pearshaped when I switched to Orcon.
(apt-get install) nmap. Nmap is cool. You might need to put some filter majick in place to have it correctly count traffic however. If not, traffic from your lan to eth0 is counted as well as (post-NAT) traffic to the internet. After much deliberation on #wlug about the topic, we ended up settling on measuring eth0 like such: (src net 10.7.0 and dst net not 10.7.0) or (src net not 10.7.0 and dst net 10.7.0) The internal network here is 10.7.0.0/24, so obviously, change for your own needs. If you have a real IP on your external gateway, you probably don't need to change that filtering at all, as nmap will probably just handle. In my case, I have a second level of NAT down the ethernet in the form of a gateway that doesn't bridge. -- A more manual approach is /proc/net/ip_conntrack - much better to use a tool that actually makes it readable for you. Craig