accounting total traffic

["Martin F. Krafft" <madduck@madduck.net>]

hey guys, tonight i am bombarding you with questions... sorry.

i need to get a semi-exact idea of the traffic through one of our
servers, in and out. i understand that netstat -s gives me interface
statistics, but there are two problems with it:

(a) it lists packets only. as i understand, a packet is not always the
same size. so that's no big use.

(b) i absolutely need to cope with the disaster case in which the
server goes down - netstat would loose all data...

there is iptables/ipchains, but (b) still applies. i figure that there
has to be a way to record these data without going higher up the
provider hierarchy, right? any ideas? i don't like daily ipchains
accounting mails and subsequent counter flushes...

martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
  \____ echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:"; net@madduck
-- 
women who want to be equal to men lack imagination.