home network monitoring and shaping

Roy r.engehausen at gmail.com
Wed Feb 13 01:15:27 UTC 2013


On 2/12/2013 4:10 PM, James Harrison wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
>
> 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


For Mikrotik routers, use the Winbox application and the Torch function 
on the interface.  You can set it to show flows by various criteria such 
as source IP.  That will tell you which client is chewing up the 
bandwidth at any instant.

Another way to go that I have not tried with Mikrotik is the Solarwinds 
Netflow analyzer.  It tracks 60 minutes of data.

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/netflow_analyzer.aspx




More information about the NANOG mailing list