New approach to bandwidth monitoring?
What I have learned about bandwidth monitoring is that the only elegant and comprehensive solution is to do bandwidth monitoring via ip addresses using a tool like bandmin, ntop, etc. So in a "reseller environment", each reseller gets and real, global IP address, so that the server owner can bill them for all the traffic of their site and all thier virtual hosts. The reseller, however, is unable to have the same ability to bill thier customers accurately, and at best can tally a set of log files for a more-or-less close approximation.
What I am wondering is whether there would be a way to set up a "virtual lan", so that each virtual host would have an lan ip, ie 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, etc. You can do something like this for apache using mod_proxy and mod_rewrite, but of course, that would only be http traffic, and that's covered by log files. Is there some weird DNS chaining that could be done, so
Global DNS: example.com ==> public ip 204.x.x.x
Local DNS @ 204.x.x.x: example.com ==> local ip 10.x.x.x?
Now the bandwidth monitor can record all traffic for each 10.x.x.x, and each virtual host's traffic can be billed and reported accurately!
If anyone has any idea of what I am talking about, and has any suggestions on how it might be implemented, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts.
half-baked, proto-Jake29
