rasplex-vnstat

A dirty hack to run vnStat on RasPlex.

Installation

mkdir /storage/local
cd /storage/local
wget https://github.com/itspriddle/rasplex-vnstat/releases/download/v1.18/rasplex-vnstat.tar.gz
tar -vzxf rasplex-vnstat.tar.gz
rm rasplex-vnstat.tar.gz

Setup PATH so you can access vnstat and vnstatd without full paths:

echo 'export PATH="/storage/local/bin:/storage/local/sbin:$PATH"' >> /storage/.profile

Setup vnStat configuration file so vnstat and vnstatd work without having to pass a --config option on every invocation:

ln -s /storage/local/etc/vnstat.conf /storage/.vnstatrc

Setup a cron to start vnstatd. This will preserve any existing crontab:

( crontab -l 2> /dev/null | grep -v vnstatd; echo '*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/pgrep vnstatd >/dev/null || /storage/local/sbin/vnstatd -d > /dev/null' ) | crontab -

Configuration

The default vnstat.conf is configured to use eth0 as the default interface when vnstat is called without the --iface option. If you are using WiFi instead, you can run this command to change the configuration:

sed -i 's|^Interface "eth0"$|Interface "wlan0"|' /storage/local/etc/vnstat.conf

Usage

After first installing, you'll need to wait a few minutes for vnstatd to start and collect usage. You can manually start it with:

vnstatd -d

To see a traffic report, run vnstat. See vnstat --help for vnStat usage.

Building

This section outlines how to compile vnStat for use on RasPlex. RasPlex doesn't include the necessary tools to compile vnStat, so this must be done on a separate Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. I used a Raspberry Pi 2 to compile and RasPlex is on a Raspberry Pi 3.

Run these commands from the Raspbian based Pi to download and compile vnStat, and package it for upload to this repo:

sudo -i
mkdir -p /storage/local/{src,bin,sbin,etc,run,var/{lib,log}/vnstat}
cd /storage/local/src
wget https://github.com/vergoh/vnstat/releases/download/v1.18/vnstat-1.18.tar.gz
tar -vzxf vnstat-1.18.tar.gz
cd vnstat-1.18
./configure --prefix=/storage/local --sysconfdir=/storage/local/etc
make
cp vnstat /storage/local/bin
cp vnstatd /storage/local/sbin
sed 's|^DatabaseDir.*$|DatabaseDir "/storage/local/var/lib/vnstat"|;s|^LogFile.*$|LogFile "/storage/local/var/log/vnstat/vnstat.log"|;s|^PidFile.*$|PidFile "/storage/local/run/vnstat/vnstat.pid"|' cfg/vnstat.conf > /storage/local/etc/vnstat.conf
cd /storage/local
tar -vzcf rasplex-vnstat.tar.gz {bin,sbin,etc,run/vnstat,var/{log,lib}/vnstat}