home network monitoring and shaping

Tue Feb 12 22:07:15 UTC 2013

Someone created an application for uverse users that goes into the gateway and pulls relevant information. The information (link retrain, for example) is then color coded for caution and out of range. The application is called up real time, not something peddled by at&t to show how "great" your connection is. People unfortunately believe a speed test is a reliable way to measure a connection quality. There may be utilities out there like this that look at signal levels and statistics to tell the user their connection blows. I believe the uvrealtime application actually shows the provider sending resets as a deterrent for using bit torrent.

>From my Android phone on T-Mobile. The first nationwide 4G network.

-------- Original message --------
From: Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com>
Date: 02/12/2013 1:57 PM (GMT-08:00)
To: NANOG list <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: home network monitoring and shaping

O oracle of nanog: unlike things like rogue processes eating tons of CPU,
it seems to me that network monitoring is essentially a black art for the
average schmuck home network operator (of which I count myself). That
is: if the "network is slow", it's really hard to tell why that might be and
who of the eleventy seven devices on my wifi is sucking the life out of my
bandwidth. And then even if I get an idea of who the perp is, my remediation
choice seems to be "find that device, smash it with sledge hammer".

It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my
home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and
tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to
me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for
static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or
touch on their home routers.

The ob-nanog is that "my intertoobs r slow" is most likely a call to your
support desks which is expensive, of course. Is anything happening on
this front? Is openwrt, for example, paying much attention to this problem?

Mike