Is there a program that will monitor network activity in the background?
 

I want a program to monitor network access in the background (which tcpdump, netwatch, and iptraf-ng don't seem to do) so I can keep track of total bandwidth used.

i assume by bandwidth you actually mean how much has been tranceived. :

ifconfig summarizes for that session. I want a program that writes to a log and either keeps a running total or allows me to grep it out. I suppose I could add a task to shutdown to extract the info from ifconfig. I looked more closely at iptraf-ng, which seems to do what I wanted. Sorry for asking before looking more closely.

thanks, i dont have any experience with iptraf-ng; please explain your solution. it mite help others in the future.

iptraf-ng, when run with the switches -B -i eth0 runs in the background and logs every packet in /var/log/iptraf/ . Unfortunately it quits for no apparent reason for me after a minute or so, even if I set a timeout with the -t switch. Without the -B switch it stays in the foreground and reports traffic.

Because I couldn't get it to work I wrote a short script to log total traffic for every session with ifconfig. Unfortunately that requires me to run it every time I end a session.