cbm: A color bandwidth meter

We haven’t seen a network monitor for a while. Here’s one from the C section that follows a very simple model.

What you see there is about everything I could make cbm do. A quick list of interfaces, their activity, their total, and a chance to see a few details. One or two controls for the display. No command-line flags other than -v and -h, and no onboard options that I could find.

If that strikes you as primitive, in light of things like ifstat or speedometer, well it is. But simplicity might be the strong point for cbm.

For one thing, you won’t need superuser privileges for cbm. You can see the activity and read the IP address, but there’s not much chance you’ll do any serious damage with it.

And as you can see above, cbm keeps a good grip on the terminal space, and will most likely fit unusual emulator shapes or panels. I haven’t tested every arrangement, but I don’t see much that would be corrupted by twisting the dimensions.

And … it’s got color. 😉

A few caveats: This was not in Arch/AUR that I could find, but is in Debian … which explains the Linux Mint screenshot. And the home page was dead, last time I tried it.

I tried to build cbm with the source available off the Debian package page, but ran into compilation errors. If you find a way to build this in Arch, let me know. It’s probably worth adding to AUR as a simple, clean, color bandwidth meter. 😉