This started one night while trying to get the open ports of our Wii Console, my wife told me that YouTube App started to play the video for some random time and then kept buffering, played some seconds and you got the picture now, impossible to watch a video from the start till the end.
I used "nmap" and yes I found that the Wii doesn't have any port open, all the communications are initiated by the console. So, if I can't monitor the network device using SNMP, MRTG, CACTI, etc., I might be able to get the bandwidth consumed from the access point, right? Well, that depends.
My (old?) Linksys WRT160N v3 with DD-WRT v24-sp2 (03/25/13) mini is great because allows me to do many things that the default software provided by CISCO / Linksys dons't support.
Yes, I know under "Status" -> "Bandwidth" you can check a graph showing the bandwidth for the WAN/LAN (eth0, vlan0, vlan1), wireless wl0, but that's not what I'm looking for, What if you need to know how much bandwidth is being consumed from a specific device? That's not available there.
While researching I found some comments saying that DD-WRT had a commercial option to get those details, I went to the website and found nothing and not really interested on paying for that. I look at other options like EasyTomato, OpenWRT, Buffalo, Gargoyle and all were the same thing.
Suddenly I saw a link with some words similar to what I was looking for and found "wrtbwmon"!
In their own words: "What is it? A small shell script designed to run on linux powered routers (OpenWRT,
DD-WRT, Tomato, and other routers where shell access is available). It
provides per user bandwidth monitoring capabilities and generates usage
reports."
Great!!!! I started to read and found that development was stopped in favor of other proyects, there was no graph but a table with numbers. Yet, was something to try. I downloaded the shell script, followed the config steps from here but the devices were displayed with the mac address instead of the ip/name.
If you want to keep the history, you need to do a backup of the data to a remote server, because if the router reboots, all that data is lost. not practical. Anyway I decided to test it, works as it promises, the data was displayed but not in real time, you need to reload the webpage.
So wrtbwmon stopped it's development in favor of lal-projects, which provides a so much better look/display of the data and for that you have to do some work, no graphs again, nothing is displayed "in real time". That doesn't do what I need.
What can I say? I'm looking for something that helps me saving time, not investing it learning how/what to do, had other things right now that already consume my ("free") time. At the end, this tools can help, not the way I want and all I can say is that I hope this helps you and provides a solution assuming this is what you want/need.
