A not oft discussed topic in router reviews (which are a dime for a dozen on the web) is how  to see just how much data your household is consuming.

Here I attempt to fill that gap by outlining the capabilities that my my router which is powered by Advanced Tomato provides. This is not a general review of the router software (which is excellent), but just some screenshots and some discussion about the bandwidth monitoring capabilities so that you can look before you leap, if you’re in the market for something that provides you with good statistics.

The router software provides two primary views by which you can monitor bandwidth usage. They are called “Bandwidth” which tracks total usage of the device across all it’s interfaces, and then there is “IP Traffic” which is useful if you want to get per-connected-device granularity.  We’re only going to cover the bandwidth monitor, but you can be confident that the per-IP statistics are just as granular.

Realtime Bandwidth Usage

 

The realtime bandwidth page provides an instantaneous view of all the traffic going through the device. I personally struggle to make much sense of the way the view is subdivided. The LAN (br0) is the bridge that links all the interfaces on the device (the two Wifi Radios as well as the 4-port gigabit ethernet switch — I’m using an Asus RT-AC56U).

You’d expect whatever is shown in the WAN tab to be what’s actually leaving your local network onto the wider internet. WL (eth1) and WL(eth2) reflect the 2.4Ghz and the 5GHz wifi radios. It’s unclear what Eth0  represents, but between Eth0 and Vlan1, one or both of them represent the 4-port ethernet switch present on the device.

Last 24 Hours Bandwidth

The 24 Hours Bandwidth chart is a little more interesting. Shown above is the WAN coverage. This presents a 24-hour view of the internet. The Y-axis shows the peak average speed and the X-axis represents time of day. Shaded areas represent times when data was being transferred. Grey shades represent downloads, blue-ish shades (which are hardly visible) represent uploads.

You  can see that large file downloads will represent comparatively wider “mountains” on this graph, and the faster the download went, the taller the mountain will be. A small, fast download will be a very thin and tall mountain.

Daily Bandwidth Usage

The total transfers done per day are detailed here, going as far back as your router storage permits. This is an aggregate of internet  bandwidth usage across all devices over the date measured.

As you can see in the chart above, we did a lot of downloading/streaming on  2018-01-05.

A similar view is provided for the weekly bandwidth chart.

Monthly Data Usage

The most interesting chart to me is the monthly data usage. It allows me to see how much data we consumed going back as far as I want, grouped by month. The top-billed month would have been October 2017 if we didn’t have an unlimited Internet Connection.

There aren’t many routers out there that can provide this kind of information. The closest competitor I have found is Google Wifi, whose statistic go back at most 60 days. This is partly the inspiration for this post. I’ve been evaluating migrating to a multiple access point system in order to improve coverage in certain parts of the home, and it’s very difficult to find out how modern-day competition compares to this configuration in terms of usage statistics.

Could not choose appropriate plugin: The requested apache plugin does not appear to be installed
Attempting to renew cert from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/nucco.org.conf produced an unexpected error: The requested apache plugin does not appear to be installed. Skipping.

When this happens, all you need to do is install “python-certbot-apache”.

Email and Contacts

Migrating from your teenage Gmail account with the unprofessional, or hard to share email address to a new spiffy, professional email address is really easy, but scarcely documented. Here is how to do it.

Sign in to your new Account, and go to Settings (the cog wheel):

Then go to Accounts and Import, and select Import from another address.

From here, you need only sign in to the old Gmail address and Google will take care of the import in the background.

You need to make sure that you have enough storage in your account for both the new and the old data. For me, this meant ensuring that I had the $2 a month 100GB plan for Google. Totally worth it. I just wish they had a 10TB option for $9.99 a month so I could use it as my cloud drive to rule them all 🙂

Enjoy.

Picture, worth a thousand words.

The Internet forums would have you believe that USB-based ethernet adaptors aren’t good enough if you’re performance conscious. I’m planning to deploy an Intel NUC mini-PC as a home router/firewall. NUCs only have one ethernet adaptor built in, but have USB3 ports.

I naturally wanted to find out what performance I might be sacrificing if I used a USB3 port as the second LAN port on the NUC, so I got an Anker-branded USB3 to Ethernet adaptor, plugged it into a laptop, and configure iperf3 as a server on my desktop.

Connecting to host 192.168.1.125, port 5201
[  4] local 192.168.1.98 port 54918 connected to 192.168.1.125 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   106 MBytes   886 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   1.00-2.00   sec   104 MBytes   871 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  93.5 MBytes   784 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   3.00-4.00   sec   106 MBytes   886 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   4.00-5.00   sec   103 MBytes   866 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   5.00-6.00   sec   102 MBytes   858 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   6.00-7.00   sec   106 MBytes   886 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   7.00-8.00   sec   104 MBytes   873 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   8.00-9.00   sec   108 MBytes   908 Mbits/sec                  
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec   111 MBytes   931 Mbits/sec       

The performance speaks for itself. It works just as good as the built-in ethernet card.

Don’t be swayed by vague claims about the suitability of USB ethernet adaptors for use in homebrew routers. They seem fine for the task.

 

A quick information card comparing VMWare Workstation 9.0 with Workstation 12.0 Pro.

The Old Version (9.0)

Usability

• There are many modal dialogs which often get in the way (example, the virtual network editor)
• Too many clicks required to get some basic information (like NIC mac addresses)
• Too many clicks to add extra hardware to VMs
• limited ability to scale virtual machines to fit monitors.

Performance

• Performance for my use case (Linux dev and test boxes, enterprise networking and Web App Firewall virtual machines, Windows Server and windows 7/8/10 VMs  for test and experimentation) is more than satisfactory. All I had to do was fully load my core i5 3570K box with 32GB of RAM (which I have yet to exhaust), and replace the spinning disk with SSDs (1.5TB worth for both bulk storage and VM disks).

Guest OS Compatibility

• As far as my experience goes, I’m able to deploy everything I want on Vmware workstation 9.0. This includes Windows Server 2012 and Windows 10.

What’s Changed?

(this is not an exhaustive list):

• It still looks and feels mostly the same as version 9.0
• The virtual network editor no longer appears to be modal which is nice
• It no longer assigns Floppy Disk controllers to new VMs — hurray!

What Hasn’t Changed?

• It still takes too many clicks to add hardware to VMs (VMWare ESX is easier in this aspect)
• Still too many clicks to find a NIC’s MAC address
• Still limited scaling options it seems (it either adjusts the VM resolution, or adjusts the window size of the hypervisor). It would be nice if it allowed you to resize a window in the hypervisor by scaling the guest OS.

What would it take for me to upgrade?

• A lower asking price

Caveat

• My use case is probably a narrow one. You should make sure you consider your own needs when evaluating version 12.0

I’m looking towards updating my desktop to two 4K displays, and it appears that two good choices of GPUs that support this kind of setup (I don’t really care about gaming on this rig) are:

• Nvidia NVS 510 – £220+
• AMD Firepro W2100 — £120

I’ll probably go for the AMD as it has a lower power consumption profile (hence lower cooling needs) and looks on paper to support exactly the features I need.