How to Install and Configure MRTG on Ubuntu Server 12.04

This post will describe how to install and configure Tobi Oetiker’s MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) on your Ubuntu home server. Once configured, you’ll be able to use it to monitor the traffic in and out of your home network using the SNMP capability in your network’s gateway\router. MRTG generates static HTML pages containing PNG images which provide a visual representation of this traffic. MRTG typically produces daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs. MRTG is written in perl and works on Unix/Linux as well as Windows. MRTG is free software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Software versions used in this post were as follows:

Ubuntu Server v12.04 x64 LTS)

mrtg_2.17.3-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Download and Install

First, download and install MRTG:

sudo apt-get install mrtg

If this is the first time installing MRTG on your server you’ll likely be presented with the following message. Answering “Yes” means that the default configuration file will be installed with permissions set at 640. Answering “No” means that the permissions are set at 644. In this example we’re going to accept the default Yes. No worries though, if you select No the steps in this tutorial will still work.

What’s the Difference Between 127.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.1?

Sometimes the most elementary of questions yield teachable moments; read on as we delve into how a single digit change between 127.0.0.0 to 127.0.0.1 offers a chance to look at network topology.

The Question

What’s the Difference Between 127.0.0.0 and 127.0.0.1?

I know that both are loopback IPs, but they have another ip mask.

What’s the difference between them? Can they be used interchangeably?

===========================================================================

IPv4 routes
===========================================================================
Active routes:
Destination               Mask          Gateway        Interface Metric
      0.0.0.0          0.0.0.0      192.168.1.1      192.168.1.6     26
[...]
    127.0.0.0        255.0.0.0         On-link         127.0.0.1    306
    127.0.0.1  255.255.255.255         On-link         127.0.0.1    306

What kind of information can we tease out from this table?