Proper reboot method when using Traffic Monitor

[PcGuy]

If one is using the Traffic Monitor to save stats to a USB flash drive in the router what is the proper shutdown procedure if one has to reboot the router? Does one simply click on the USB symbol in the UI to safely close dow the USB flash drive then power cycle the router? I am asking because I simply power cycled the router and all of my data was apparently unreadable. I had to start over.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I would say just use the Reboot button in the GUI rather than trying to unmount the drive first.

 

[PcGuy]

All I know is that if the router is powered off the stats have to be reset via
Create or reset data files:
Enable if using a new location

Otherwise, the graph is not displayed properly on an Asus AC-86u w current firmware. I see the screen completely go blank for a second or to and no bar charts are displayed at all. If I reset the data files I at least see a bar chart. The problem is I have lost a week's worth of data so before I attempt to accumulate more data over a longer period onto a USB 2 FAT32 formatted drive I wanted to know what the proper shutdown/reboot procedure is.

Even the Reboot command causes issues. After the reboot if I go into traffic monitor and select last 24 hours this is what I see. There is no grid. The grid only shows up properly after I reset data files.

 

[Martineau]

If one is using the Traffic Monitor to save stats to a USB flash drive in the router what is the proper shutdown procedure if one has to reboot the router? Does one simply click on the USB symbol in the UI to safely close dow the USB flash drive then power cycle the router? I am asking because I simply power cycled the router and all of my data was apparently unreadable. I had to start over.

You could try using the following commands in '/jffs/scripts/services-stop'

logger -t "Stopping rstats....."
service stop_rstats

logger -t "Stopping cstats....."
service stop_cstats

providing you can perform a controlled shutdown either via the GUI of from the command line.

 

[PcGuy]

Is that services-stop issued via a telnet session? I am more familiar with dd-wrt which has a command area in the firmware where one can issue commands. I could not find any such area in Merlin to do that.

 

[ColinTaylor]

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng/wiki/User-scripts#services-stop

But the reboot button in the GUI issues the same commands anyway.

 

[PcGuy]

Ok if the reboot option does the same thing then the /jffs/scripts/services-stop is probably not going to help. Am I the only one storing these stats on USB and having this inability to display the prior collected stats after a power cycle or reboot via the GUI reboot button?

Is it possible to use NVRAM to store month after month of these stats rather than USB flash drive which, at least to my brief experience with them, seem to have issues with power downs or reboots.

 

[predatorz]

I use traffic stats to my usb3 thumbdrive connected with below settings so that i will only lose up to nearest hr for traffic stats in the event of hard power off/on or reboot, power loss to router

Save history location ( Directory must end with a '/'.): /mnt/sandisk/
Save Frequency: Every 1 hour
Create or reset data files (Enable if using a new location): No
Starting day of monthly cycle: 1

 

[PcGuy]

I use traffic stats to my usb3 thumb drive connected with below settings so that i will only lose up to nearest hr for traffic stats in the event of hard power off/on or reboot, power loss to router

Save history location ( Directory must end with a '/'.): /mnt/sandisk/
Save Frequency: Every 1 hour
Create or reset data files (Enable if using a new location): No
Starting day of monthly cycle: 1

That is exactly what I had. Doing a Reboot via the menu UI button or a power cycle resulted in the blanking of the screen on the Traffic Monitor page and no stats showing up after the reboot or power up completed. I had to do a reset of the data files every time on the USB flash drive in order to get the grid to show up sans of course any data. Using a USB2 flash drive but even that should be able to keep up with the amount of data being read/written

What is the advantage of using USB vs NVRAM other than preserving the data during firmware reload when using USB?

 

[predatorz]

That is exactly what I had. Doing a Reboot via the menu UI button or a power cycle resulted in the blanking of the screen on the Traffic Monitor page and no stats showing up after the reboot or power up completed. I had to do a reset of the data files every time on the USB flash drive in order to get the grid to show up sans of course any data. Using a USB2 flash drive but even that should be able to keep up with the amount of data being read/written

What is the advantage of using USB vs NVRAM other than preserving the data during firmware reload when using USB?

NVRAM has a finite times of read/write cycle like all flash memory hence using USB will be the better option

 

[ColinTaylor]

NVRAM has a finite times of read/write cycle like all flash memory hence using USB will be the better option

That's not really a concern any more. The real problem is a) you lose the data if you factory reset the router, and b) NVRAM is limited on some models (see the numerous posts in these forums from people who have filled it up).

 

[PcGuy]

Ok switched over from NVRAM to USB again and waited a couple of hours and did a reboot via the UI and this time the traffic chart showed the history like it should rather than a blank graph w no Y axis lines like it did before. Using a USB2 flash drive but that should be fine for the amount of data being written.

 

[PcGuy]

Is there a problem with traffic stats when using USB and powering off the router with the power button after the Reboot via UI did not fix an issue? The reason is that I enabled the radios in this router today and doing a reboot via the UI did not enable the radios even after I went into the Professional area and enabled each radio separately and clicked on Apply. I had to power cycle the router and the radios work but when I go to the traffic page I am seeing the same blank screen for daily and last 24 hours. Have not had the router long enough for the monthly stats to be any use.

Is it normal to lose the all the past stats in the Traffic Monitor page if one has to power cycle the router? The firmware only writes the data out to the USB but never retrieves it in situations like this?

 

[ColinTaylor]

Is it normal to lose the all the past stats in the Traffic Monitor page if one has to power cycle the router? The firmware only writes the data out to the USB but never retrieves it in situations like this?

No that's not normal. When the router boots up it will try to reload the stats from the file. If the USB file is not available it will keep trying until it succeeds.

Given that this shouldn't happen and you have another thread where your router was behaving abnormally with manually assigned IPs I'd suggest your router is really messed up or faulty.

If you want to carry on trying to diagnose this you could upload your current complete system log to pastebin for us to look at.

 

[PcGuy]

I was using a folder on the USB flash drive called "Asus Router Traffic" and the Syslogs showed

"Problem loading /mnt/sda1/Asus Router Traffic/tomato_rstats_04922680f030.gz. Still trying..."

So I ejected the drive copied the gz file to the root of the USB flash drive and changed the location "/mnt/sda1/" and when I did that the daily stats showed up. The last 24 hours starts still only show the current traffic along the right-hand side of the graph.

 

[ColinTaylor]

It's possible that the router can't cope with path/file names that contain spaces.

Using a filesystem other than FAT32 (i.e. ext4 or NTFS) will help protect your data from corruption if you power off the router.

 

[PcGuy]

ok think the drive is in fact FAT32. I guess it is time to eject the flash drive backup the files format it as NTFS and copy the data back over. This power cycling was intentional since I could not get the radios to active properly.