I’ve been getting repeated emails from my ISP about “exceeding my bandwidth cap” and they feel very incorrect.
My current router is a Cisco RV260, and it doesn’t have a great way of tracking traffic. (There’s a port traffic screen that does give tx/rx bytes, but no way to see any date ranges).
Is there anything out there that can give an accurate account of Internet traffic? It would be nice if I could see destination domain/IPs, just for kicks and giggles, but an overall traffic count is all I really need.
Thanks!
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The RV260 supports SNMP. You can use that with a network monitoring tool of your choice to get ifInOctets/ifOutOctets data. The rate of change on those numbers is then the amount of traffic sent/received.
Ah. Good to know! I’m starting to dive down this rabbit hole, and we’ll see where it takes me. Thanks :)
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I prefer to run hardware supported by OpenWRT or DDWRT. These have monitoring and firewall options under access control.
If you are not the type to flash your own hardware, pcWRT might be an option. It is small business consisting of a dude in Texas that created a simplified front end for OpenWRT. You just have to trust him, which I haven’t had a problem with, and is probably better than trusting whatever underpaid person has access to similar interfaces for whatever commercial vendor you choose. He has a well secured SSH used to send out occasional updates for the device automatically. His setup does not give you access to the underlying OpenWRT system behind his front end, but with a USB to serial converter and a port on the board you can access OpenWRT in a terminal. I have it setup to log any activity and never had any issues. I’m no expert, but I did install Gentoo once.
https://shop.pcwrt.com/collections/all
No affiliation/not an affiliate link. Beware that some people pushing his stuff are doing an affiliation deal. Also, while his stuff is nice and relatively simple, it has more value in the past when OpenWRT was much harder to setup on your own. OpenWRT is open source but the pcWRT frontend is not.
I feel like it’s just me, but all of my devices with Open/DDWRT crap out after a couple years. Even well-reviewed prosumer-grade gear ends up becoming wildly unreliable in an unacceptably short amount of time. I had to double-check, and my order history puts me at a new router every 2-3 years. This “business class” RV260 will be hitting 2 years in the fall, and I’m already experiencing wonky behavior where it needs to be rebooted regularly. Maybe it’s just an unspoken truth that anything below true “enterprise tier” kit requires a weekly reboot. I should just put it on an outlet to cycle the power every Sunday at 2am or something…
That said, I do love DDWRT!
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Are you asking for new router suggestions? Or you meant bandwidth monitoring for just one device on your network?
That sort of info is best recorded at the router level. pfSense has packages you can install that record bandwidth usage & are useful for that. Not sure about OPNsense but I think (?) that would have something similar.
I’m intending to upgrade to a pfSense router and some other switch in the future. This is just supposed to be a temporary-ish investigation into the potential fuckery coming from my ISP.
I used to use pfSense. It’s great.
I recently moved to opnSense… And I think it’s better.
Both are good, both are BSD, both have similar settings (tutorials are mostly interchangeable)… But opnSense just does it better, updates more frequently, nicer UI etc.If you are talking to yours ISP, it’s worth getting a bridge modem, and settings details for your own router.
This modem will turn “isp” into ethernet, then your opnSense/pfSense can make the actual connection. This means it gets the public IP directly.
