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!
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!
Hey, I thought of mentioning, but got sidetracked and forgot. Most of the dozen or so consumer grade routers I have hacked around with seem to have less than optimal placement of DC stepdown converters located around the processor and radio circuit blocks. I mean, they appear to be optimised for radio as the primary design constraint, not for what is best for the DC converter operation. They tend to place electrolytic capacitors in close proximity to circuit blocks that get quite warm. I can’t say how often capacitors are creating problems, but it would not surprise me if this is the cause of many issues for many people after a year or two. I can say that I had problems with a cable company provided modem a few years ago. It had an obvious leaky cap and several that were around 25% out of spec, along with a couple identical parts that were around 5% out as I would expect with my typical shelf stock. Replacing all of them fixed the modem.
This is actually a great theory. I’ve fixed several monitors and TVs that were just bad capacitors. It’s a logical conclusion with these, too.