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Ask Slashdot: How To Monitor Your Own Bandwidth Usage?
Vrtigo1 writes "With many ISPs either already using bandwidth caps or talking about them, I was wondering how other Slashdot readers are keeping tabs on how much data is being transferred through their home Internet connections. None of the consumer routers I've used seem to make this information easily accessible. I'd like some way to see exactly how much data has been sent and received by the WAN port facing my ISP's modem so I can compare the numbers I get with the numbers they give me. I don't want to pay for their modem firmware updates and other network management traffic, so I'd like to see how the two numbers line up."
Tomato.
DD-WRT.
I use Tomato firmware on a WRT54G v2 router. It has many ways of viewing used bandwidth.
Use the SSID "LINKSYS" or "NETGEAR" and it doesn't seem to matter.
Trolling is a art,
Install vnstat on your gateways and/or points where you want to monitor the traffic. It will monitor "per device" so it can be useful running it on a gateway so you can compare internal network traffic to external traffic.
I am on Uverse and while they don't cap, I still like to know how much is coming and going from my connection. What can I say, I am addicted to information. Anyway, with a bit of wget and some perl, I pulled the up/down bytes from the web page of the Motorola 2-wire gateway/router/thingy (most any router will offer this in some form) and I pump that into Cacti for storage and graphing. Tada!
And why wouldn't you pay for their overhead and data they choose to send to you for updates, etc?
Does your contract really say you don't?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.pfsense.org
Set yourself up with a real Unix firewall, and get your info to the byte-level. Heck, you can even configure it to email you reports.
ClearOS reports this and will give you all the function you need. It is great for both seasoned and beginner Linux users. The alternative is to set it up yourself. It is free and will run on that old computer you have in your closet.
Tomato has WAN bandwidth usage built it so that should get you what you want. Beyond this I wrote an add-on to tomato (but should really work with almost any linux based firmware) to store bandwidth usage per IP or Mac Address on your local LAN to see who is using what. Detail are here:
http://soft-haus.com/wiki/index.php5?title=IPTables_Bandwidth_Monitor
The FritzBox ADSL modem/router has an menu where you can see your internet usage.
http://www.fritzbox.eu/en/index.php
Your ISP is likely not counting bytes that transfer through a connection to your modem. They are probably using a number of interesting tricks instead, probably mostly because whatever they bought into does something different. At a minimum counting packets and saying they are all MTU-sized would give different results and would eliminate the overhead of counting bytes.
If you are really, really nice about it, they might tell you what they are really measuring. But they probably will not. Even if you have a bandwidth cap in place, they probably aren't going give you detailed information about what they are measuring and how they are measuring it. Mostly, this would be for fear that you will use that information to figure out some way to circumvent it. In this case information certainly equals power - they have it and do not want you to have it.
So, while your router can count bytes with the right software, it probably isn't going to match up with what they say you are using, assuming they report it to you. My guess is your number will be lower, but it could go either way. In any event, the only number that means anything in your relationship with your ISP is their number. You will not be able to convince them that your number is "right" or "more correct" than their number.
Unless you need a number for your own management purposes - like finding out your neighbor creating 45% of the traffic on your connection - I'd say this is a pointless exercise.
If you're not comfortable/willing to install a custom firmware, the Netgear N600 has a meter built in.
I'd be particularily interested in knowing how one could query that information from the router without browsing to the router.
I'd love to have a utility that sits in a small corner of my desktop, just showing me how much bandwidth has gone through the router.
Does DD-WRT offer a way to do that?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/14/1444213/ATampT-To-Introduce-Broadband-Caps
I'm on Verizon, too, and they have no problem with me daisy-chaining my own router (DD-WRT) onto theirs. I agree that it might be fun to hook straight into their fiber modem with CAT-5 and skip the business of having coax and a second router in the loop, but it's their network and their modem. I'll get more huffy about it if/when I transition to IPv6 and don't want two layers of NAT between me and the network. In the mean time, though, it's trivial to shut off the transmitter for the router they provided and set up one that I can manage competently.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
I used ipac-ng http://ipac-ng.sourceforge.net/ for many years, until its lack of maintenance caused it drop significantly behind newer Linux kernels. sigh. Worked brilliantly when it did work though.
It means running all data through a linux box, but this is a given for me as I always have a firewall box for iptables, so I can split off my public IPs and home network. But all a bit much for a home ADSL connection really.
Who's charging for router firmware updates? The ones I've found were free downloads.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
pfSense. Been running it on ALIX board for years. Love it.
http://www.pfsense.org/
I put a pair of RFC1149-to-Ethernet gateways between my border router and my cable modem.
I then estimate the number of packets by measuring the amount of poultry poop between the gateway devices.
I multiply this by an estimated average packet size and I have a pretty good estimate of the number of bytes transferred plus the number of bytes lost.
Unfortunately I'm still trying to figure out my packet-loss ratio. Once I've got that down I'll have a better handle on how much traffic is going in and out of the modem.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This may be overkill for many home networks, but we use pfSense running on an about-8-year-old computer.
Besides for firewall, NAT and bandwidth reporting (per-IP and aggregate), we are running Squid/SquidGuard and a VPN connector.
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz (2793.01-MHz 686-class CPU)
RAM: 512 MB
I use BitMeter OS. http://codebox.org.uk/pages/bitmeterOs It's a nice piece of software that has a number of useful features, such as a stopwatch that measures the amount of bandwidth you are using over a short period of time. You can also query a database that has information on your bandwidth usage over time. You can export these data as a CSV. The only drawback is that, by default, the software writes to your drive every 1 second when it is in use. You can change this using command line options. I have it write once a minute personally.
Windows app: http://www.bwmonitor.com/ has worked great for me for a long time. Obviously, it's just for the current workstation not router.
You do it at your router. Easiest way is with a router that supports linux and use tomato as they have a whole bandwidth monitoring built in with good statistics.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
My 5 year old FRITZ!Box keeps traffic statistics for the current day, last day, last week, and current and previous months, with the stock firmware. It did so when it ran as a DSL modem, and it does so now it's configured as a WLAN router connected to the cable modem. I kinda assumed that level of features was standard...
Stephan
I use a Linux router running nfsen on the internal interface. From there I can set filters that count flows, bytes, and packets in and out of the router. (I can also go back in later and look at who was doing what if the resulting graphs look funny.)
I don't expect the numbers that I get to match what my provider's say; I just expect that if they claim I am over, I will be able to confirm that (within certain loose percentages) and then figure out why I am over.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I'm swedish so caps aren't really of any concern to me. I do however monitor my bandwidth usage using SNMP + rrdtool with a small web page that shows bandwidth usage and some other statistics (including room temperature, system load and uptime for my home server).
I used to just use "rrdtool graph" to create images but I recently switched to using a jQuery-based client-side plotting library called flot since it produces my cleaner graphs and it also allows me to use AJAX to update only the data rather than push a whole new image on every update...
You could easily modify a solution such as this to also monitor total data transferred over a specified period of time (such as the current calendar month or the last 30 days).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I have Cacti polling the byte counters on my Linux router interfaces, which then puts all that into an RRD file. I can then see usage by graph definitions created in Cacti.
But one very useful feature of Cacti is the '|sum:auto:current:2:auto|' feature (google this for further info), which does exactly what it says. Add this into any graph definition, and it will sum the entire data set values across the time frame that has been specified for the graph (obtained from the RRD file) and print you the sum of the values.
In other words, I can take my mouse, select the last 30 minutes of my bandwidth graph within Cacti, and it will tell me how much bandwidth I have used within this 30 minutes. Similarly, I can also select the last 30 days, and see my usage for the last month. In short, I can select -any- time period I want from my graph, and it will tell me how much data I have downloaded/uploaded during the selected time period. Very useful feature indeed (and one I don't think many know about).
If you are willing to replace your router, I highly reccomend the FreeBSD-based router software "PFSense". It runs on any X86 hardware, and combines the ease of use of a commercial router, with the highly advanced networking features of expensive routers, while running on any hardware you have (so if it breaks, you can just move your config files to another machine, boot it up, and begin running again). I am so confident in it, I deployed it at my workplace, a multi-million dollar business with about 75 users, and several WAN Connections. Recommending it because it includes a bandwidth meter, is like recommending an airplane because it has a reading light; That is only one of its many features and uses. http://www.pfsense.org/
Is it overheating?
When the sun shines directly on my old WRT54G it seems to hang. I moved it to an always shady spot and put a bit more space around it and it's been stable ever since.
For specific details, like how much my ISP thinks I've been using, and plans to charge me for, I go to their web page and bring up my account.
Then you're using too much.
If you just have a single Windows workstation, DUMeter works well. http://www.hageltech.com/dumeter/about
... and I run a cron job hourly that takes a snapshot of the network traffic (in and out) for that hour and then uses syslog to write the data to a log file. I know my hourly traffic for the past couple of years.
I used to use DD-WRT or Tomato, but I wanted a faster router/firewall with more features. so I built a Mini ITX router with the following.....
http://www.ipcop.org/ - a great high end firewall package.
http://m0n0.ch/wall/ --BSD based and solid as a rock.
http://www.pfsense.org/ if you want gobs and gobs of plugins and features. it's a fork of Monowall with more plugin support.
NOTE: some people consider plugins to be evil for a firewall. I find having to run 3 servers for a home network to be silly. So I run pfsense with a gajillion plugins for the features I want and a fileserver/app server on the inside.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Reboot your router on the 1st of every month (so you remember how, etc). Better to find out it doesn't boot when you're ready to fix it, rather than 2am some random day. That would imply the 1st is an excellent day to upgrade to the latest everything, just in case you missed a security advisory, etc.
Then, anytime, log in and "ifconfig" and look at the second to last line of the external interface (last line is a blank). Probably, you initially set up the firewall with eth0 plugged into the LAN and got it all set up, then plugged eth1 into the cablemodem or DSL modem or wireless gadget or whatever while reconfiguring eth0 to the old firewall's inside ethernet config. So probably "ifconfig eth1 | tail -2 | head -1" is all you really need. Assuming your email is working, have a cron job run that nightly or whatever and get an email. Or put it in a nice little script, or have the MOTD updated to contain that hourly, or whatever.
I do VLANs on the inside for the phones vs everything else (yeah for linux support of dot1q), and some traffic routes from the inside webservers to the phone web interfaces, so its much simpler to watch the "outside" than the "inside".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
My home server is running Cacti querying my Airport Extreme basestation/router. It might be a bit much for the average user, so another option would be to find a Linksys or other type router that you can run Tomato on. It'll do this type of thing.
I'm on Uverse too, and when I go to their bandwidth usage thing, it basically says that it's under construction and I don't have to worry about how much I'm using.
Presumably they're rolling it out slowly.
Putting moderation advice in your
1) They bill you, you pay, end of story.
2)So you Don't pay, no service, and bad credit.
3)So You Sue, you pay more and perhaps something good happens. Good luck.
"It does not matter Whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it's bound to be bad for the pitcher." -- Man of La Mancha
This can be tricky (but still doable, of course) on a 32-bit OS because the counters wrap around 4 GB.
sorry didn't meant to post as AC before... anyway:
DD-WRT on your router + ntop running on another machine. Ntop gives you all sorts of pretty graphics and stuff. Very easy to use.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I received one of these from the joint FCC-SamKnows bandwidth project. Its firmware has been customized to allow monitoring and reporting, but other features have been left alone. To the point, it has a "Traffic Meter" feature, with control and statistics functions that will keep track of monthly upstream or downstream bandwidth usage, or both. It has several options for keeping you from going over a set limit, including messages, flashing an LED, and a complete cut-off. My previous D-Link DGL-4300 was ridiculously expensive but had no such feature. When the SamKnows project is done in a few years I can re-flash this with other OpenRouter firmware like Tomato.
Right now it's telling me that I'm already 7.6 GB into my new AT&T cap, dammit....
NetMeter. I have a older free version running on my desktop, but I think the new one is only a free trial. But it keeps my bandwidth logs nice and neat. Daily, weekly, monthly. Now, I need one that shows what programs are using what bandwidth.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
They will need to build in a Margin of error...
You will likely see that you are getting associated with traffic that is not for you... (All Broadcast traffic will likely be included.. EG ARP Traffic as well as any potential Multicast traffic that has not been properly setup)
Also depending on how they gather Stats you might see Network Management Traffic associated with your connection as well...
It would be interesting to see if Comcast is including their IPAD streaming feeds in your data caps or excluding it...
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
I am with Cogeco Cable in Ontario, Canada. I have a 60GB Upload/Download Cap. They have a "feature" as part of their website that will allow you to check your bandwidth. The problem is it is only updated once a day (at midnight presumably). Considering 12MB/s on a 60GB cap, I can blow through a HUGH chunk of it, without knowing. Particularly if for instance I am downloading some pretty obscure garbage with few seeders, I might queue up a whole lot of stuff thinking it will be slowly downloading over a period of weeks... when all of a sudden some folks log on, and zip I suck it all down in an evening.
I accidentally doubled my cap one month because of that, @1.25$ per GB.
Having something that could read bandwidth on real time would be useful. Having something that would do that AND shut down my torrents once a certain threshold would also be nice.
Currently I try to just be careful and keep track in my head how many GB I have and will download. However with more software doing massive updates in the background this can be hard to manage, and will only get worse.
I use an old Cisco 2912XL-EN switch to connect my home network and collect SNMP stats from it. You can pick these up cheap on Ebay, but any enterprise class switch that supports SNMP will work. Gig switches will be pricier, though. I collect data from all the ports, so I can see both aggregate traffic on the firewall internal and external interfaces (on different vlans), as well as traffic from individual PCs, servers, or other IP devices.
Obviously this requires having a computer running all the time to do the polling, but I have a few of those already anyway. PRTG (for Windows) or MRTG (for *nix) are a couple of good free collectors, but I am sure there are many more as well.
Net Usage Item has been my weapon of choice for bandwidth use here in Australia. It's just a Firefox addon that grabs the information from the ISP and displays it as a handy bar in the browser. http://netusage.iau5.com/
Cable companies don't usually offer internet-only service and when they do they charge almost as much as if you had their overpriced television service.
That used to be the case. I am not promoting TWC since they are louts like the rest, but in LA they are finally advertising $29.99 cable modem service, no other crap required.
Http://www.switchtotwc.com
If you happen to be in a TIme Warner area.
.
I have a D-Link DIR-655 that I haven't taken the time to update from the factory firmware. No traffic usage monitoring at all in the stock firmware, so I grabbed a "UPnP Gateway Traffic Monitor" applet that runs in Windows.
I'm using this: http://www.d-bross.com/en/downloads/
The software seems totally lame, but apparently the key phrase to search for is "UPnP Traffic Monitor" and there are a couple little cruddy things that will monitor your WAN interface in some way.
A simple not-quite-perfect fix for monitoring traffic, says I.
We're no strangers to caps here in India. They're referred to as a "fair usage" policy. I used Networx for a while - it gave me excellent logs and graphs, until my ISP informed me that my uploads also count towards the cap. That's when I asked them to tell me where I could monitor my usage according to their specifications. Turns out that their site listed daily details of downloads and uploads - the best option simply because it tells me exactly how much I'm using according to the entity that's going to bill me.
Bitmeter is very nice. I use it on my gateway computer to measure the total in/out traffic for the household. It shows usage at hourly, daily and monthly intervals.
It seems to me that if the ISP is going to impose these caps they would be obligated to provide such tools for their customers to monitor their own usage.
If you're THAT worried about hitting your cap....or don't like it. Switch ISP's. Maybe if enough cap-placing ISP's lose business to companies that don't place caps on bandwidth, they'll get the idea.
I used to tell the comcrap sales people that hang out in every store I didn't want their service for a variety of reasons; too expensive, bad quality, monopolistic practices even down to "you plain won't give me service" (which was, in fact, 100% true as I'd been disqualified for even analog service) - the last year it's been the excuse of "I've got Verizon, STFU" - but here's something that might surpise you (or not), Verizon, being one company people seems to complain about...they have no usage limits on thier service. Big deal for DSL right? Try FiOS. Now I basically tell them "my current provider is twice the speed as your standard service and has no service limits" - they stay speechless...and trust me...when you can pull nearly 4 to 500 gigs of data off usenet a month and your ISP doesn't complain...you stay with 'em.
A friend of mine near Boston switched from comcrap to RCN solely for the fact that RCN does not throttle/cap users.
The real question is, why are you still on a provider that does?
Using a Firefox add-on.
#!/usr/bin/ruby
# I would have put this on github, but first it's horrible code and second I don't want my slashdot identity linked to my github one.
# create database 2wire; use 2wire;
# create TABLE readings (timestamp TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW(), port INT NOT NULL, txbytes BIGINT, rxbytes BIGINT, txpackets BIGINT, rxpackets BIGINT, txerrors BIGINT, rxerrors BIGINT, primary key `dateport` (timestamp, port));
series = `curl -s 'http://172.16.0.1/xslt?PAGE=C_2_0'`
(activeport, activeline) = [ nil, nil ]
data = Array.new
series.each_line {|line| /.*([0-9]*).*/ /rowlabel.*Port ([0-9]+) / then
if activeline == 4 then activeport = nil; activeline = nil end
if activeport then
line =~
$1 == "--" ? value=0 : value=$1.to_i
data[activeport].push value
activeline += 1
elsif line =~
activeline = 1
activeport = $1.to_i
data[activeport] = Array.new if data[activeport].nil?
end
}
1.upto(data.size - 1) {|port| # remember data is a zero-based array, but the ports from 2wire are positive integers
(txbytes, txpackets, txerrors, rxbytes, rxpackets, rxerrors) = data[port]
`mysql 2wire -e "INSERT INTO readings (port, txbytes, rxbytes, txpackets, rxpackets, txerrors, rxerrors) \
VALUES (#{port}, #{txbytes}, #{rxbytes}, #{txpackets}, #{rxpackets}, #{txerrors}, #{rxerrors})"`
}
du ~/pr0n/downloads/
Why not just pony up about $69/mo...and get a business connection for your home.
Yes that will 'fix' it but why should i be screwed as a home customer?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Already posted a solution for that.
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2120414&cid=36004040
Double NAT works tolerably well if you set up your interior router as DMZPlus under the 2wire router config. DMZplus eats incoming ICMP traffic, so if you have MTU problems on your vpn link, the link may appear to be dead, but you can probably fix it by manually reducing the vpn's mtu. VOIP shouldn't be a problem; SIP uses tcp/udp so you can forward that through like any other app even if you don't use DMZplus.
The 2wire routers also have horrible routing capability, so getting a static IP block is a bad idea, and the 2wires are also very picky about what's on their local layer-2 network. Plugging a device onto the 2wire's visible ethernet (i.e. not behind another router) and giving the device multiple IPs, or switching its IPs, is a great way to confuse the 2wire router. The firmware was written by morons.
Recommendations for 2wire router users: get another router (my current favorite is the buffalo wzr-hp-g300nh, 32mb flash 64mb ram, comes with branded dd-wrt and can be easily flashed with openwrt). Put that router behind the 2wire in dmzplus mode. Connect a switch to the interior router and connect everything to that.
The only things that need to be on the 2wire's local layer 2 lan are the interior router and the uverse cable DVR if you get TV as well (and if you get voip through uverse then you probably need that on the 2wire's ethernet domain too).
Matt Dillon complains about the 2wire router: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2011-02/msg00074.html
So I dug an old Catalyst switch out of the closet, put my cable modem on one port, my Time Capsule WAN port on another; put them on their own VLAN. I set another port to be the replication port such that all traffic on the cable modem is replicated to this port. I plugged this port into an unused ethernet port on one of my servers. I run MRTG on this port. I found that my bandwidth accounting more or less matched what my cableco was reporting. Unfortunately, in the process I also discovered that there were a dozen or so hosts in my neighborhood that were ARP-spamming so I started a tcpdump of packets that were not for me or from me and have been logging all of them. After 3 months of doing this, it would appear that these spurious ARP's account for 4% of my monthly bandwidth allotment. From this I deduce that the cableco is querying the counts directly from my cable modem and not any sort of upstream router. I'm currently collecting data and will present an accurate accounting to them when I get my first usage bill. I realize they will probably say something to the effect of that traffic being outside of their control but I will point out that everyone on my street or neighborhood or whatever the granularity of my head-end is paying for this traffic. At $2.00/GB of over-usage, multiplied by the number of people on my street who could potentially be over their monthly cap, they are raking in a tidy profit for what amounts to non-internet traffic. I figure the local media will be most interested in this math.
This is about 29 days worth:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3858284544 2011-05-02 15:31 notmine.cap
tcpdump -n -r notmine.cap arp | wc -l
reading from file notmine.cap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
47256871
$ bc -l
47256871*46
2173816066
That's about 2GB of ARP packets in nearly a month.
In a cable environment, what's usually measured is the actual bytes transferred to and from your cable modem. The measurement is recorded on the CMTS the cable modem connects through to provide a network connection. The CMTS numbers include bytes to/from devices (PCs, game consoles, smart phones, etc.) as well as a small amount of network overhead that's just between the cable modem and the CMTS. The overhead is typically a few K bytes per day. So the exact usage will never tie exactly to what's recorded on a home router, but it should be within +/- 5% at worst and typically run closer to 2% to 3%. The home router reported usage will be a little smaller than the CMTS side reported usage that the cable company will use for managing bandwith caps, but that can easily be compensated for by implementing a "grace buffer" of a few % over stated cap limits to account for variability. Whether or not this is done is another matter. But either way the actual variance is minimal.
$60 will get you 12/2 Comcast business, and $75 will get you 12/2 with a static IP.
http://business.comcast.com/internet/plans.aspx
I'm very happy using Mikrotik (mikrotik.com) products. You can buy a ~49$ license and install their software -RouterOS, a Linux derivative- on an old PC. You can also get one of their hardware products (routerboard.com), excellent choice if you care about power consumption. I highly recommend the RB750G wich is a small SOHO router in a nice plastic case. With RouterOS you can do a whole lot of interesting things, monitoring bandwidth usage is just one of these things.
I live in Canada and have a bandwidth cap. I've been using a Netgear UTM5 to log WAN usage and attempt to reconcile the UTM5's counts with my ISP's (Rogers). I have two observations:
The simply logs provided by routers (even a SOHO router like the UTM5) do not allow the drill down capability. For example, the UTM5 only provides detailed HTTP(S) logs; although it does keep aggregate counts for some other protocols.
My dilemma is that although I can determine how much HTTP(S) data my teens consume, I cannot determine what other applications they run are consuming. As a result, I haven't been able to completely get a handle on WAN usage and some months I am forced to block access to media streaming sites for the last few days of the month--so that we don't end up paying the ISP extra charges. My preference is to develop a better understanding of the traffic and then remove the offending applications from the LAN, but I simply don't have the data in hand to do that.
I didn't say you should live in the middle of nowhere. I say live where you want. Freedom.
The guy who said move close to work and ride a bike? That's not me. It's Steven Chu, Obama's energy secretary. In a speech at Harvard a couple months ago. And he said gas should be $7-$9. Watch it, I found it on youtube.
If you want the government to tell you where to live, how to live, well I disagree with that.
.
:trollface:
I don't want to pay for their modem firmware updates and other network management traffic
1. Most likely, their ability to provide management of the modem is in the terms of service. Even if you saw a significant difference, how would you prove it was firmware updates, and even if you could, would you be able to get reimbursed for the traffic?
2. Most likely, the modem updates and network management traffic is a small fraction of your total bandwidth usage (e.g. 20MB/month).
Most ISPs (well, those that don't have complex "this service is free, this is not" products) do accounting based on the interface counters of the virtual interface on the border router. To be able to separate the firmware and network management traffic, they would need to do DPI instead. The cost of the equipment upgrades to do this would have to be passed on to the consumer. Most likely, that would cost more than what the firmware updates and management traffic are costing you.
Yes, being able to see (without incurring more bandwidth use) how much you have used is useful, but not for the purpose you wanted ...
How many emails do you need?
Surely its cheaper to go the google apps way, and tie your domain to gmail , so you can have 1000s of accounts for a much cheaper rate with the added bonus of no need for a server.
Google apps free version is easy to setup.
point a special mx/name record to them on your domain and bingo.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
try software like netpersec or dumeter. although this will only work if every PC on the network uses it religiously. also works if you have no router
Yes that will 'fix' it but why should i be screwed as a home customer?
People seem to want gigabit networks, unlimited transfer, and great customer service for $8/mo. And a pony.
The presence of the bandwidth caps on residential is an economic clue - it's what can be supported at those price levels. The home Internet service is offset to a degree by the crazy prices of cable TV.
The business class service is really what most Slashdotters want. Fast, no caps, no port bans, and you can get on the phone and talk to a guy editing the reverse zone files to put in your PTR records and be done in under 10 minutes. Shocker that this level of service costs more money to operate, right?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)