Bandwidth monitoring on Orbi

[mith_y2k]

I have wanted Netgear to give us simple bandwidth monitoring. My need is pretty basic, I’d like to know how much bandwidth each device is using. My need is simply to check who are the bandwidth hogs and if there is any device that is using an unexpectedly high amount of band.

has anyone looked at this and does for example Entware offer a package that does this? I saw another thread covering live network usage, but not daily or monthly data.

thank you in advance

 

[digits n bits]

I’m beta testing an Orbi system right now.
There is a network usage log for daily and monthly use but it doesn’t log per device.
I’ll check and see to make sure.

 

[mith_y2k]

I have an Orbi with the stock firmware. I can see overall usage in packets, but a) that requires I do my own math all the time and b) as you said it’s just overall, not per device and not for specific time amounts

 

[Simon Roberts]

Would ntop-ng be too much work for an Orbi? But that's $ware for the pretty version, so a bit frustrating.

I'd like the same data, and can't believe I have to hack my own router to get anything useful!

On a related note - is the use of each of the interfaces documented somewhere? Looking at mine (RBR50 + 2 satellites: one wired, one wireless), and comparing output of "brctl show" and ifconfig + iwconfig, it looks like:

- brwan (has Internet IP address from modem) is a bridge device that contains just eth0

- br0 (has Orbi LAN IP address) is a bridge device containing everything else

Matching against the stats from the UI:

WAN 1000M/Full ==> brwan (bridge eth0)
LAN 1 Down ==> eth1?
LAN 2 100M/Full ==> eth1?
LAN 3 1000M/Full ==> eth1?
WLAN b/g/n 400M ==> ath0, IEEE 802.11ng ESSID:"mywifiname", Frequency:2.452 GHz, Bit Rate:400 Mb/s
WLAN a/n/ac 866M ==> ath1, IEEE 802.11ac ESSID:"mywifiname", Frequency:5.18 GHz, Bit Rate:866.7 Mb/s
WLAN Backhaul 1733M ==> ath2, IEEE 802.11ac ESSID:"NETGEAR_ORBI_hidden40", Frequency:5.785 GHz, Bit Rate:1.7333 Gb/s
==> ath01, IEEE 802.11ng ESSID:"NETGEAR_ORBI_hidden40", Frequency:2.452 GHz, Bit Rate:400 Mb/s

The TxPkts/RxPkts line up for WAN+LAN (against ifconfig) but not for WLAN.

My guest network is disabled:

ath02 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"NETGEAR-Guest"
Mode:Master Frequency:2.452 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
ath11 IEEE 802.11ac ESSID:"NETGEAR-Guest"
Mode:Master Frequency:5.18 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Bit Rate:0 kb/s Tx-Power:21 dBm

 

[mith_y2k]

There are a number of posts around the internet covering the different interfaces. I’m not sure any are complete. This is one that is covering a lot: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Or...Secrets-etc/m-p/1746323/highlight/true#M60920

 

[mith_y2k]

Circling back on this, adding ntop-ng to the firmware or to the entware package would be amazing. Not sure if the Orbi can handle the load though. Maybe a minimal version?

@Voxel ?

 

[Simon Roberts]

If not, then collecting the data and sending to somewhere "bigger" for processing/archiving? (a raspberry pi maybe)

 

[badsombrero]

@mith_y2k did you ever get any working solution to this? Would be so great to be able to pinpoint how much data each device is using.

 

[mith_y2k]

@mith_y2k did you ever get any working solution to this? Would be so great to be able to pinpoint how much data each device is using.

I made no progress . I found a tool called vnstat and that comes with Entware so I was thinking of playing with that. Nothing actually done though

 

[badsombrero]

That’s what I was afraid of. If Orbi supports SNMP maybe there are some software programs we could run from our PCs that would work? Maybe Wireshark? Even with all the horrible things I’ve heard about Disney Circle something like that might give us per device stats.

 

[mith_y2k]

I’m thinking of trying this when I have some spare time: http://www.snbforums.com/threads/vnstat-on-orbi.64200/

I’m not sure how much CPU will vnstat eat, but generating static images with vnstati seems like a good idea

 

[e38BimmerFN]

Someone wanna give netdata a try using voxels FW and Entware?
www.snbforums.com/threads/r7800-voxels-firmware-measure-wan-bandwidth.59553

 

[mith_y2k]

I installed netdata. It looks like I did not have the issues you encountered. opkg install netdata and then manually starting it (I didn't feel like restarting) worked for me. At least for me the default configuration was on port 19999.

It's nice to see real time data. Do you know if it can also provide information on the clients? That's what I'm personally more interested into. That's the bandwidth I'm curious to monitor.

 

[mith_y2k]

Has anyone tried YAMon or luci-wrtbwmon.

I’m worried that YAMon will be slow running on bash, but installation seems feasible. I didn’t see big gaps after a quick look. Luci-wrtbwmon needs binaries if I understood correctly

 

[mith_y2k]

I installed YAMon and it looks like it’s working on the surface but not in practice

I found at least 2 issues and I’m wondering if others know of workarounds:
1. While the symlinks are created in the Web sever’s directory some files and directories aren’t accessible from the browser; a very quick test seems to show that once you’re in the symlink you can’t open files beyond that same directory, I.e. /www/symlink/subdir/file.html isn’t available and I get a 404
2. Crontab doesn’t get installed and even if I add the lines in /etc/cribrava/root after a few hours it gets overwritten; not sure what overwrites it

there might be more that I haven’t spotted yet

 

[R. Gerrits]

regarding point 1, perhaps a permission issue?? Don't know the Orbi firmware, but on R7800 symlinked files/folders are served perfectly fine.

regarding point 2, I think you meant /etc/crontabs/root but had your fingers shifted to the left during part of the words?
Also here, if Orbi is a little similar to R7800, then a binary file (/sbin/net-util) is overwriting it.
But probably you could create a new crontab in a different folder and start a 2nd instance of /usr/sbin/crond

 

[mith_y2k]

Lol, love the autocorrect of “crontab”!!! I tried fixing it twice but then I was in a rush writing from my phone

thank you for the tips as always. Permissions looked right at first glance but I’ll take another look. I was also surprised one level depth would work, but not further.

 

[R. Gerrits]

Permissions looked right at first glance but I’ll take another look. I was also surprised one level depth would work, but not further.

perhaps you have 644 (or comparable) on the subfolder, instead of 755? (folders need executable bit, in order to be browsable)

 

[mith_y2k]

perhaps you have 644 (or comparable) on the subfolder, instead of 755? (folders need executable bit, in order to be browsable)

Files and directories permissions look right. I re-ran the setup script for YAMon and it looks like some of the paths are wrong. In essence a few of the js and css I need are created in the wrong path so that's why it doesn't work. They don't support Orbi or any netgear out of the box so I guess there are some small differences that need to be taken into account.

I also found in YAMon's log files that it tries to use option -w in iptables which isn't supported in the binary in Voxel.

Some great pointers R. Gerrits, I need to do some more digging.

 

[R. Gerrits]

Your post also got me curious.
So I also tried to get it installed on my R7800.
Some of the things I ran into:
- several scripts use the shebang #!/bin/sh, but the scripts use functions that are only supported in bash (at leash I get Bad substitution syntax errors) -> I worked around that by changing the shebangs to #!/opt/bin/bash to force to use the bash from entware

- I also see the 404 error, when it tries to load http://routerlogin.net/yamon/js/config4.0.js
Did some testing -> it seems that the webserver in the router requires that the actual path on disk contains www.

So having the files in /tmp/yamon/ww/ and symlinking /www/yamon to /tmp/yamon/ww/ gives a 404
but when using /tmp/yamon/www/ and symlinking /www/yamon to /tmp/yamon/www/ than it can load that file.

- but then it starts complaining about some js errors. One I fixed by editting config4.0.js and changing the _firmwareName (which had some mess with too many quotes).

But it still complains about an unexpected token '.' on two lines that start with .ajax({
although in the raw .html, they start with $.ajax({
No solution yet.


I don't experience the iptables -w issue on R7800 though.