IPTables byte count inconsistent

2

I have the following IPTables rules - basically to allow only 2 IP addresses to access the internet. These rules are on my home wifi router running DD-WRT.

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 16114 packets, 1355844 bytes)
    pkts      bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         
    1454   106133 ACCEPT     tcp  --  any    any     anywhere             anywhere            tcp dpt:ssh 

Chain FORWARD (policy DROP 0 packets, 0 bytes)
    pkts      bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         
     257    14367 ACCEPT     0    --  any    any     anywhere             192.168.1.101       
     461    39776 ACCEPT     0    --  any    any     192.168.1.101        anywhere            
     513    57439 ACCEPT     0    --  any    any     anywhere             192.168.1.104       
     781    39507 ACCEPT     0    --  any    any     192.168.1.104        anywhere            

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 12408 packets, 2700791 bytes)
    pkts      bytes target     prot opt in     out     source               destination         
    1055   186138 ACCEPT     tcp  --  any    any     anywhere             anywhere            tcp spt:ssh 

I also want to track the number of bytes received or transmitted by each of these 2 IPs.

I am looking at the Bytes column in iptables -vx -L FORWARD to know the bytes sent/received.

However the numbers in the Bytes column seems to be much less than what i expect. The above numbers have been recorded after downloading more than 10MB of data on 192.168.1.101. The downloaded byte count reads only 14KB.

Why does this difference exist? Is there something i am missing?

Madhavan Malolan

Posted 2018-03-16T01:36:08.520

Reputation: 121

This is just a guess but I don’t think packets that are NATed to the internet pass through the FORWARD chain. You should be looking for statistics in the POSTROUTING chain, and the results will be combined for all traffic to the internet unless you create individual NAT rules. – Appleoddity – 2018-03-16T04:17:40.387

Have you found any answer for this question? – Rasool Ziafaty – 2019-08-17T12:40:02.480

No answers