home network monitoring and shaping

Wed Feb 13 00:10:19 UTC 2013

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On 12/02/2013 21:56, Michael Thomas wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

I've been using per-connection queues on a Mikrotik 450G; this permits
shaping based on the destination/source IP, so no one device can nom
all of the bandwidth on the link unless it's uncontested; should more
than one device want all the bandwidth they both get half, and so on
(in a typical config). It's not flawless but it's a massive
improvement on no shaping whatsoever.

The gotcha is that you need to configure your link speed in the router
for it to be aware of the capacity it has to play with, but that's not
something you have to touch very often most of the time (though if
your connection speed/upstream capacity varies, there's not a lot
that'll help you at that point. But it does most of the time stop the
"X is watching HD YouTube videos and now I can't check my email" sort
of problems. It's a nice set-and-forget solution.

ntop or similar on a Linux boxen in concert with flows from said
Mikrotik tends to help more than anything for analysis of usage etc,
but it's still an inelelegant solution to the problem of analyzing
links in this scenario. I'd be interested in what other people are
using for home connection debugging.

Cheers,
James
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