A Few beginners Questions

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MJK
MJK's picture
A Few beginners Questions

HI all, just got myself a WNR3500L, and sorry being a bit lazy and not going through all the forums for answers but I got a few immedaite queries if you could kindly help:

Firstly, do any of the DD-WRT, Tomato etc add-ons give more sophisticated router monitoring? The monitoring with the router's software is fairly basic, I've got a PC cabled to it here and then 3 wireless laptops connected and I'd like to be able to see the upload and download totals for each (by MAC number would be easiest) and preferably see these totals by hour (I've got traffic managment from my ISP at certain times and therefore need to check how much people are using).

Secondly, I know its maybe more something for the Networking strand but do any of these add-ons have any features which can signficantly boost/enhance your routers' signal? I got the router (upgraded from a 802.11g) specifically to get video from my PC here downstairs to an upstairs room (got an ASUS media player there) and its been very disappointing, very disjointed and can't see any difference from the old router - I've got the router at full signal and media optimised in QOS, but can this extra software help further in any way??

And then more generally, which of these add-ons might suit me best? - apart from my requirements above, I'm not the really the technical type that wants to do a lot of extra fine tuning (though I am not averse to a bit of tweaking here and there!). Just about all my requirements are met by the NETGEAR software so are there any great benefits from these add-ons - which aren't too complicated to understand and set up??

Many thanks in advance for your consideraiton and of course, your knowledge, MJK

flashed
flashed's picture
Hi,

Hi,

I am a new user of tomato. The usage by MAC is not there ( or at least I don't see where it is). However, if you want you can use the following rudimentary commands in Linux. For example, let's assume you want to monitor the IP address in your LAN 192.168.1.132.

From your PC, telnet your.router.ip.address
once logged in type:
# iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.132
# iptables -I FORWARD -d 192.168.1.132

( repeat the lines above for the other IP addresses that you want to monitor)

Then, when you want to check the quantity of bytes, use the command
# iptables -L -n -v | grep 192.168.1.132
It will show you the number of packets and the number of bytes. Uploaded and Downloaded.

You could schedule this in the cron.
I hope it helps....

MJK
MJK's picture
Thanks for the response, but

Thanks for the response, but for me its all sounds a bit too programmey - so basically there's no nice facility where you might, for example, on the Status, System Information page, have somewhere you could click on to bring up an updating graph of in and out volume? (i.e like the bandwidth one but for actual volume). Thats really all I want, no sophisticated traffic analysis, just the totals in and out, by device, over time, so I can keep within my ISPs traffic managment. So if there's another way, e.g. some sort of router monitoring software that's easy to use (tried PRTG and way to complicated for me!) I'd be every interested to hear about it.

(I've since addedd another post about this subject at: http://www.myopenrouter.com/forum/thread/23146/Monitoring-Displaying-Rou... with erm, no replies yet, so I don't know if this is an unsolvable subject or its been dealt with somewhere else I didn't know about).

Kong
Kong's picture
You probably want something

You probably want something like:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=75275&postdays=0&postorder=...

any features which can signficantly boost/enhance your routers

Yes they do have such features DD-WRT and Tomato. But usually this is beeing overrated. Raising the TX Power does not give you a much better signal, if the antenna is not optimized for it. Instead it causes overheating issues if to much traffic is sent over air.

If you want better range you should make sure you also have N clients. A N router does not increase range for G clients.

P.S. A normal traffic monitor is already included in dd-wrt but that just shows combined up/down traffic for all clients.