gkrellm keeps a note of it

http://bandwidthd.sourceforge.net might be what you are looking for
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/177232 might also be useful

Thanks for these suggestions. Gkrellm is nice, but it seems to be doing what plain system monitor is doing (in ubuntu). Bandwidthd isn't working well for me.

I found iptraf console tool to be useful for monitoring current connection speed and IP traffic in general..

I will check that article about iptables.

Thanks
Daniel

The firestarter gui shows the iptables bytecounters, and also makes configuring/managing/watching your firewall really easy.
The version provided by archlinux has an awful bug in the events tab that makes it hang though... so as long as you're not interested in what the scriptkiddies are failing to do to your system, it works fine :smt075

I've been using Cacti for measuring BW, memory usage, etc. I've found it to be very accurate and can be configured for alerts and other such goodies.

I'll have to try that one.

Download bandwidth is actually no longer much of a concern for me because I got satelite flat rate downstream over proxy, but I still need to know how big is the upload that still goes over "charged-by-MB" EDGE modem.

Thanks

Charged by the MB...ouch!

If you ever run into issues though and need a mirror, we'll happily accomodate whatever we can spare from DC. Currently I have 2 dedicated servers that use nowhere near my alloted BW per month.

Thanks. It's alright though since 512MB are included in the subscription and I think that it should be enough for just upload which basically consists of only sending requests and such information to establish and keep connection and eventual FTP uploads that I do. All in all I doubt it can be more than 512MB.

I'd still like to verify it though (before I get the the bill), which is why I'm looking for some bandwidth measuring tool. On arch forums they say cacti is in the AUR repo so I might give that a go.

Thanks