Ask Slashdot: How To Monitor Your Own Bandwidth Usage? 319
Vrtigo1 writes "With many ISPs either already using bandwidth caps or talking about them, I was wondering how other Slashdot readers are keeping tabs on how much data is being transferred through their home Internet connections. None of the consumer routers I've used seem to make this information easily accessible. I'd like some way to see exactly how much data has been sent and received by the WAN port facing my ISP's modem so I can compare the numbers I get with the numbers they give me. I don't want to pay for their modem firmware updates and other network management traffic, so I'd like to see how the two numbers line up."
again? (Score:5, Informative)
Tomato.
DD-WRT.
Re:again? (Score:5, Informative)
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I have four WRT54GL routers running DD-wrt.
Not a damned one of them can remain stable and online for more than an hour, except when configured as a simple wireless bridge device.
Just install network traffic loggers on each machine. Do some simple math at the end of the month.
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I have four WRT54GL routers running DD-wrt.
Not a damned one of them can remain stable and online for more than an hour, except when configured as a simple wireless bridge device.
Just install network traffic loggers on each machine. Do some simple math at the end of the month.
Interesting. I don't actually use the WRT54GL (any router with a Broadcom chip will work), I use an Asus something-or-other (whatever was cheap). I use Tomato (it offers printer support for the USB port on the router), and I've never had any stability issues - it has been up for a couple of months last time I checked.
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I'd love to use DD-WRT.
Unfortunately, my setup is much more sane. My router is wired and I have a separate wireless router (that JUST does wireless) to handle the wireless portion.
Since DD-WRT isn't available for my wired-only router, no happiness there.
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You don't need a fancy, embedded router to flash DD-WRT onto. It'll work just fine on standard PC hardware, too. In fact, I'm running the general PC build of DD-WRT on a slightly modified Firebox II (basically, an embedded-ified PC with a low-powered desktop CPU from about 10 years ago... a Pentium 1 MMX, if I recall). I'll readily admit it's overkill for most home users to build something, but any PC with a pair of working network ports should do the trick.
As an alternative, there should be plugins for
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I haven't measured it scientifically, but my Firebox II consumes FAR less power than even a low-powered modern desktop PC. There's a disk controller, 3 network ports, a couple of low-RPM fans, the aforementioned Pentium MMX, a single PC133 module, and... that's about it. I'd have to guess it's ballparking at about 25w under my moderate usage. This is based on the readings on the "green" UPS when only the router is connected to it.
Finding a decent store-bought router that will accept DD-WRT or tomato (or
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I don't know what you're doing wrong.
"Time: 10:28:55 up 315 days, 4:49, load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.00"
It's sitting in a garage with no heat or AC. I use just about every aspect of DD-WRT and have moved terabytes of data through it in the last few months. And that's hardly a record for my old Linksys routers.
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Do you move terabytes of data via WiFi? I can use mine for months for general use, but if I start trying to transfer gigabytes of data over the wireless all at once, it will lock up.
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Yes. I used a wireless-G bridge to the router for years and the current setup was wireless-G direct to the router until I cleaned up the kludgy network "design" and ran wires about a month ago.
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Hm. My wireless bridge show that it has transferred 14Tb since February 12, that works out to about 2MB/sec of sustained transfer rate.
Works perfectly fine.
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It's sitting in a garage with no heat or AC.
One of the things that drives me mad when I post on overclocking forums is that people often talk about temps without ever saying what their ambients are. Never mind the delta on their humidity.
I live in Florida and so when some one, like your post, says something like this without saying what type of environment that hardware is in it has no validity to me. You could be like me in an environment that could easily kill any consumer level hardware I were to leave it in a garage. Or you could be in a incre
Re:again? (Score:4, Informative)
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WRT54GL not...stable (Score:3)
Is it overheating?
When the sun shines directly on my old WRT54G it seems to hang. I moved it to an always shady spot and put a bit more space around it and it's been stable ever since.
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I have had router problems for years with the standard OEM software. The last router that got replaced was a Dlink N (single band) one that was around $100. I decided to pop for the latest Dlink ???400 dual-band N router but I knew the prior one failed because of heat. The router is in a 2nd floor loft area which gets quite warm in the summer and the AC thermostat is on the 1st floor.
So, I made a little stand with a fan blowing up. The fan was salvaged from a computer with a noisy bearing. Being a 12-vo
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Or, route all your traffic through one machine, and keep track on that one machine. That's part of what Internet Connection Sharing is for.
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Which version of the DD-WRT firmware are you using? Unfortunately finding the most stable version can be a nightmare. But unless you're running a version suggested in this thread [dd-wrt.com] I would consider upgrading. Make sure you read all relevant information [dd-wrt.com] before doing so, of course.
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If you believe that x.24 and x.26 are dd-wrt firmware version numbers, you are doing something wrong.
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This doesn't really work for me since most of my heavy network activity is through video game consoles (Gaming / Netflix / downloading demos / etc)
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Could just be a hardware issue. Those wrt54s aren't exactly the highest quality routers. My wrt54g ran fine for a couple years but the wireless is now unusable. I suspect the hardware in most of these craps out over time.
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Tomato was the only firmware I could get to be stable on a WRT54GL. It was a rock though. Give it a look.
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Do remember these devices are built extremely cheaply. Get them hot, or their power goes out of spec, and they go flaky. It could be overheating, or it could be the wallwart's dying, both of which are equally likely.
After all, Linksys/Cisco isn't willing to spend the few pennies for a reverse polarity diode, who knows what else they skimped on.
The bigger issue though is the WRT54GL doesn't
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Switch to Tomato. It's far more stable and is perfect for what the OP wants to do. Though I've not tried any of their versions Tomato USB (http://www.tomatousb.org/) ads some of the features that DD-WRT has like VPN, etc. It's been stable on a variety of Broadcom routers it's compatible with (Linksys WRT[G|GS|L], Buffalo, Asus).
I seldom have to reboot my router (months of uptime) and the bandwidth tracking keeps 24 months of history. The start of month date is also settable to coincide with the users bil
Re:again? (Score:4, Interesting)
I really hope Cisco puts out an updated version of this router. This thing has to be their best seller (I'm going out on a limb and stating that the customization ability is key to that) and I can see why it's been around since 2002. I have two of them myself I continually mess around with. They still kick out newer revisions, but they haven't really changed much in the line of overall capability. Just sit down, draw up plans for a fully third party flashable update and make it awesome hardware wise. Let the guys at Tomato/DDWRT do their thing.
Re:again? (Score:5, Insightful)
But why not just address the root problem here...the capping.
Why not just pony up about $69/mo...and get a business connection for your home.
I have mine with Cox cable and it is great. I get roughly 10-14 down and 5-10 up...at times I've measured it. I have no caps. I can run all the servers I want to. I even get a low level SLA, and the few times I've needed help, they are on the phone with me almost any time I need it..and they have even sent people out to the poles around my places when I needed help in the middle of the night even.
So, why not get a connection like that? Its not that expensive, and you get the bandwidth you want plus a few perks.
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Interesting experience for me with Comcast.
I had considered going the Business Class route because, frankly, it would be "the right thing to do" since I host a mail server.
Here was the rub: while I was able to get a Business account, they assign a dynamic IP. Well, first problem I ran into was related to email; Comcast Business dynamic IPs are in a ton of RBL's, hence email delivery is stopped.
Called Comcast to ask them about it. Oh, for $15 more a month a could get a static IP, and THEN they'd help with bl
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I pay $4 shy of that in Dallas for Time Warner residential 15 down / 2 up. Next suggestion?
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Why not just pony up about $69/mo...and get a business connection for your home.
That would be nice. However, there is only one provider here with a business class connection available (TWC) and it costs $125 for 10/1, and that is the fastest plan
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Why not just pony up about $69/mo...and get a business connection for your home.
That would be great, but many ISPs like Charter won't even sell you a business connection unless you live in a location that's zoned for commercial use/operate out of a commercial building.
In both the house I was renting a year ago and the apartment I live in now (within a 1/4 mile of each other), Charter refused to let me purchase a business connection even when I offered a copy of my state business-tax number.
I guess Charter is not home-office/home-business friendly.
I guess it is good to be the king (or t
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That cheap? I pay $50 for decent DSL, and the only thing cheaper is dialup really. Are you listing the real price, or only the first-year price for new subscribers?
Of course it depends on what you want. I'm happy with 150KB/s speed (on a good day only) and it's fast enough for me. Some kiddies though are paying $100/mo for mere phones. I wouldn't mind faster speeds for only $50, but I don't know if it's possible. I'd either have to get cable TV or u-verse TV, and then rewire the house to from the cabl
Time Warner $30 Cable Modem Service. (Score:2)
Cable companies don't usually offer internet-only service and when they do they charge almost as much as if you had their overpriced television service.
That used to be the case. I am not promoting TWC since they are louts like the rest, but in LA they are finally advertising $29.99 cable modem service, no other crap required.
Http://www.switchtotwc.com
If you happen to be in a TIme Warner area.
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NetWorx - http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/
It does all kinds of funky graphs. The options are plentiful. You can set usage alerts. The logs are detailed enough; all user accounts, all networked PCs, .
Just a happy user. Sorry for not being geeky!
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That's beside the point, people shouldn't have to go that route just because the ISP doesn't feel like upgrading their infrastructure. Around here Qwest doesn't have caps and all is good in that respect, but the top connection speed they provide is 5mpbs, for roughly the cost of a 40mbps connection on fiber and they aren't even giving us the 5mbps they're promising. With Century link buying them out, I'm not sure if we're going to have unlimited connections for much longer, given that Comcrap does have caps
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Sweden having (in actuality) close to 3% of the population is a large factor, but why can't the US providers offer higher speeds in the areas with higher population density? Last time I checked, California was just about the size of, say, California as well. And had ~37 million residents.
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Can't? It's not that they *can't*. They don't want to.
These are big bad monopoly companies and they are having a great time screwing us all. The telcos and the cable companies are happy as clams with essentially no competition.
They are metering us now, 15 years ago they offered us metered ISDN which no one wanted, or wanted to pay for. These same companies kept us from getting the broadband we wanted for *y
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Then again, you might consider tea over coffee, instead. I will leave these decision decision up to you.
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I wish they'd just release the older v2.2 - 4 WRT54G again and stop shipping the new stuff. The older routers worked just fine for home use.
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Problem being, my bandwidth is three times higher than the 54Gl's WAN port.
But I'm liking Untangle on a spare P4.
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How about with stock firmware? I don't like having to upgrading and reconfiguring my routers so often.
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I'm running DD-WRT on a Netgear WGR614L. I've run both Tomato and DD-WRT on it. Be aware that not all WGR614 models can run Tomato or DD-WRT. Always check the supported router listings!
See http://www.myopenrouter.com/ [myopenrouter.com] for a listing of supported routers.
Re:again? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll throw my two cents in here too. DD-WRT has been rock-solid for me, and has some rather nice graphs for viewing bandwidth.
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I have no problems viewing my usage. It's under the "Users and Settings" tab when I click "My Account" on comcast.net
Tomato (Score:5, Informative)
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Yep, I've been very happy with Tomato, which shows both real-time and aggregate data bandwidth use.
If you want even more detail into what's taking up all your bandwidth (port / protocol / IP / etc.), you could put up a box running ntop [ntop.org] (the web-based "ntop", not the console "ntop" similar to iftop that only gives instantaneous usage info).
You might also be able to forward traffic from your router to a sniffer on a real machine running these tools, if you search for "[router] SPAN port" or "port mirroring"
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They won't provision ethernet, meaning they wont let you plug whatever ethernet device into the router that you like? You are limited to one computer? What is this, 1998?
Re:Verizon Fios (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm on Verizon, too, and they have no problem with me daisy-chaining my own router (DD-WRT) onto theirs. I agree that it might be fun to hook straight into their fiber modem with CAT-5 and skip the business of having coax and a second router in the loop, but it's their network and their modem. I'll get more huffy about it if/when I transition to IPv6 and don't want two layers of NAT between me and the network. In the mean time, though, it's trivial to shut off the transmitter for the router they provided and set up one that I can manage competently.
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"they won't provision ethernet on my residential account"
I've heard that before - maybe even here on /. Simple solution to that is, plug a router into Verizon's router. You have one single connection coming out of Verizon's modem/router, so the router is happy. Plug whatever the hell you want to plug into your own router. You're paying for a service, you not paying to be told how you may use that service.
Custom script and cacti, of course (Score:2)
I am on Uverse and while they don't cap, I still like to know how much is coming and going from my connection. What can I say, I am addicted to information. Anyway, with a bit of wget and some perl, I pulled the up/down bytes from the web page of the Motorola 2-wire gateway/router/thingy (most any router will offer this in some form) and I pump that into Cacti for storage and graphing. Tada!
Your cap starts today. (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite today (Score:2)
I'm on Uverse too, and when I go to their bandwidth usage thing, it basically says that it's under construction and I don't have to worry about how much I'm using.
Presumably they're rolling it out slowly.
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http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/14/1444213/ATampT-To-Introduce-Broadband-Caps [slashdot.org]
Good to know. Lets see... Quick check... Um no, even with heavy bittorrent activity my usage hasn't topped 200GB/mo. While it stings a little knowing that I "theoretically" get less, hey if it means my Netflix streams are a little bit better (I can still stream 400 some hours of netflix at the highest bitrate) then I am ok with it.
Commence with the "they came for the gypsies, and I said nothing, yadda yadda"...
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They came for the egregious bandwidth hogs, and I said nothing.
They came for the pedophiles, and I said nothing.
That was where it ended, and the world was a better place. Whew!
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FritzBox (Score:2)
The FritzBox ADSL modem/router has an menu where you can see your internet usage.
http://www.fritzbox.eu/en/index.php [fritzbox.eu]
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FritzBox Fon 7270 here. Latest 04.90 firmware even does IPv6. Provides nice stats per day, week, month. SIP->DECT->POTS->ISDN phone service, wireles with private and guest network, NAS over USB. The best modem I ever baught
Why would you think the numbers would match up? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your ISP is likely not counting bytes that transfer through a connection to your modem. They are probably using a number of interesting tricks instead, probably mostly because whatever they bought into does something different. At a minimum counting packets and saying they are all MTU-sized would give different results and would eliminate the overhead of counting bytes.
If you are really, really nice about it, they might tell you what they are really measuring. But they probably will not. Even if you have a bandwidth cap in place, they probably aren't going give you detailed information about what they are measuring and how they are measuring it. Mostly, this would be for fear that you will use that information to figure out some way to circumvent it. In this case information certainly equals power - they have it and do not want you to have it.
So, while your router can count bytes with the right software, it probably isn't going to match up with what they say you are using, assuming they report it to you. My guess is your number will be lower, but it could go either way. In any event, the only number that means anything in your relationship with your ISP is their number. You will not be able to convince them that your number is "right" or "more correct" than their number.
Unless you need a number for your own management purposes - like finding out your neighbor creating 45% of the traffic on your connection - I'd say this is a pointless exercise.
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You make a good point about their accounting tricks and bullshit. I have a couple of Clear 4G adapters and was impressed that I'd managed to pull over 100 gigs through one of them for two months straight. I just went back last week to see what my most recent month had been and saw that I'd somehow gone back in time and moved over 500 gigs in both of those first couple months. And I just looked now and see I'm down to 400something and 200 gigs for those months. And last month's usage went from 128 to 131
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No: Its a Monopoly (Score:3)
1) They bill you, you pay, end of story.
2)So you Don't pay, no service, and bad credit.
3)So You Sue, you pay more and perhaps something good happens. Good luck.
"It does not matter Whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it's bound to be bad for the pitcher." -- Man of La Mancha
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You're not exactly in a strong negotiating position as the customer. You either pay up or get cut off, and while you can sue them, they're not obliged to keep you as a customer. If you're short of options in your local area, the words "nose", "spite" and "face" spring to mind.
Re:Why would you think the numbers would match up? (Score:5, Informative)
If that is the case, (and I would assume the asshats would do this) then they are opening up themselves to a huge lawsuit. If you're going to measure "bandwidth" and put limits based on usage in terms of bytes (giga/tera) then you best be measuring bytes, and not the packets * MTU, which is a gross over simplification of the measure. There is no way that packets * MTU can be said to equate to anything in "bytes" except for pointy headed managers.
There are too many programs using low level states that need keep alive packets going, that don't measure in MTU size units. MTU is ~1400 bytes, and ping uses 32 bytes ... yeah that will work.
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Their definition is always going to be that the bandwidth you are using is whatever they are measuring which is subject to change at any time without notice.
Anything else would just put them in a position where they say you transferred 1,735,287,513 bytes and you think you only transferred 1,735,287,512 and you (and your lawyer) want see what their measurements are based on. And of course, your lawyer gets a court to order them to come in an testify on how these measurements are being made and what the dif
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GP assumed that the cap mechanism would not count bytes because that is apparently supposed to be difficult or something. I'm not sure.
The traffic shaper we use where I work would be a bit of overkill for the job, but it could be used to enforce a capping mechanism. The hardware is, shocking I know, primarily sold to ISPs. And counting the number of bytes passing on the wire is trivial -- when low latency hardware can make shaping decisions based on source and destination IP address, ports used and the prot
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In any event, the only number that means anything in your relationship with your ISP is their number. You will not be able to convince them that your number is "right" or "more correct" than their number.
You might not be able to convince them, but you are able to switch ISP.
One possible use... (Score:2)
I am with Cogeco Cable in Ontario, Canada. I have a 60GB Upload/Download Cap. They have a "feature" as part of their website that will allow you to check your bandwidth. The problem is it is only updated once a day (at midnight presumably). Considering 12MB/s on a 60GB cap, I can blow through a HUGH chunk of it, without knowing. Particularly if for instance I am downloading some pretty obscure garbage with few seeders, I might queue up a whole lot of stuff thinking it will be slowly downloading over a perio
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Actually, not only do they likely do exactly that, they also most likely expect your modem to report its own usage. Why load up their routers when your CPE will kindly do the dirty work for them?
I have had a capped plan for quite a while now, and the modem keeps an accurate (within 1-2% of what my router says) local tally of my traffic. The modem itself also enforces service degradation when I go over my (daily) ca
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And if their TOS says you agree they don'
Netgear N600 (Score:5, Informative)
If you're not comfortable/willing to install a custom firmware, the Netgear N600 has a meter built in.
pfSense (Score:2)
pfSense. Been running it on ALIX board for years. Love it.
http://www.pfsense.org/ [pfsense.org]
Use rfc1149 as an aide (Score:3, Funny)
I put a pair of RFC1149-to-Ethernet gateways between my border router and my cable modem.
I then estimate the number of packets by measuring the amount of poultry poop between the gateway devices.
I multiply this by an estimated average packet size and I have a pretty good estimate of the number of bytes transferred plus the number of bytes lost.
Unfortunately I'm still trying to figure out my packet-loss ratio. Once I've got that down I'll have a better handle on how much traffic is going in and out of the modem.
pfSense (Score:2)
This may be overkill for many home networks, but we use pfSense [pfsense.org] running on an about-8-year-old computer.
Besides for firewall, NAT and bandwidth reporting (per-IP and aggregate), we are running Squid/SquidGuard and a VPN connector.
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (2793.01-MHz 686-class CPU)
RAM: 512 MB
Tomato... (Score:2)
FritzBox (Score:2)
nfsen (Score:2)
I use a Linux router running nfsen on the internal interface. From there I can set filters that count flows, bytes, and packets in and out of the router. (I can also go back in later and look at who was doing what if the resulting graphs look funny.)
I don't expect the numbers that I get to match what my provider's say; I just expect that if they claim I am over, I will be able to confirm that (within certain loose percentages) and then figure out why I am over.
No caps here (Score:2)
I'm swedish so caps aren't really of any concern to me. I do however monitor my bandwidth usage using SNMP + rrdtool with a small web page that shows bandwidth usage and some other statistics (including room temperature, system load and uptime for my home server).
I used to just use "rrdtool graph" to create images but I recently switched to using a jQuery-based client-side plotting library called flot [google.com] since it produces my cleaner graphs and it also allows me to use AJAX to update only the data rather than p
Try asking. (Score:3)
For specific details, like how much my ISP thinks I've been using, and plans to charge me for, I go to their web page and bring up my account.
If you have to monitor (Score:2)
Then you're using too much.
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If I don't have to monitor because I have massive overhead, then I'm paying too much for what I don't need.
Of course, that's the ISP's argument for metering in the first place. So I'm not falling for it.
I want as much bandwidth as the most modern technology allows. I paid for that when i first bought an "ultimate" plan and agreed to a big monthly bill, and I'd better fucking get it in perpetuity.
DUMeter (Score:2)
I run OpenBSD as my firewall... (Score:2)
If you want a more full featured firewall.... (Score:2)
I used to use DD-WRT or Tomato, but I wanted a faster router/firewall with more features. so I built a Mini ITX router with the following.....
http://www.ipcop.org/ [ipcop.org] - a great high end firewall package.
http://m0n0.ch/wall/ [m0n0.ch] --BSD based and solid as a rock.
http://www.pfsense.org/ [pfsense.org] if you want gobs and gobs of plugins and features. it's a fork of Monowall with more plugin support.
NOTE: some people consider plugins to be evil for a firewall. I find having to run 3 servers for a home network to be silly. So
ifconfig (Score:2)
Reboot your router on the 1st of every month (so you remember how, etc). Better to find out it doesn't boot when you're ready to fix it, rather than 2am some random day. That would imply the 1st is an excellent day to upgrade to the latest everything, just in case you missed a security advisory, etc.
Then, anytime, log in and "ifconfig" and look at the second to last line of the external interface (last line is a blank). Probably, you initially set up the firewall with eth0 plugged into the LAN and got it
ntop (Score:2)
sorry didn't meant to post as AC before... anyway:
DD-WRT on your router + ntop running on another machine. Ntop gives you all sorts of pretty graphics and stuff [ntop.org]. Very easy to use.
Router solution: Netgear WNR3500L (Score:2)
I received one of these from the joint FCC-SamKnows bandwidth project. Its firmware has been customized to allow monitoring and reporting, but other features have been left alone. To the point, it has a "Traffic Meter" feature, with control and statistics functions that will keep track of monthly upstream or downstream bandwidth usage, or both. It has several options for keeping you from going over a set limit, including messages, flashing an LED, and a complete cut-off. My previous D-Link DGL-4300 was
Use an SNMP collector (Score:2)
Obviously this requires having a computer running all the time
ruby script to log 2wire 3800HGV-B traffic to mysq (Score:2)
#!/usr/bin/ruby
# I would have put this on github, but first it's horrible code and second I don't want my slashdot identity linked to my github one.
# create database 2wire; use 2wire;
# create TABLE readings (timestamp TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW(), port INT NOT NULL, txbytes BIGINT, rxbytes BIGINT, txpackets BIGINT, rxpackets BIGINT, txerrors BIGINT, rxerrors BIGINT, primary key `dateport` (timestamp, port));
series = `curl -s 'http://172.16.0.1/xslt?PAGE=C_2_0'`
(activeport, activeline) = [ nil, nil ]
data = A
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Not only that, but it will constantly pull 100w+ vs the ~10w that a router will use!
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I'll make a note of vnstat for cumulative usage.
For point-in-time bandwidth usage, I often use nethogs.
It breaks down current bandwidth usage by program, much handier than by host.
Click here to install [apt] (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint)
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FYI for anybody trying this out:
The Ubuntu package (likely the same as the Debian package) doesn't create a database when you install.
So after installing, do this:
$ sudo vnstat -u -i eth0
Then start the service:
$ sudo service vnstat start
Check stats:
$ vnstat
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This [ubuntuforums.org] appears to work.
Or if you want to get really fancy, DD-WRT lets you control the LEDs on your router. It probably wouldn't be that hard to create a script that flashes your bandwidth usage in Morse code at a predefined interval.
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