[RT-N66U] Per-device daily traffic report not available

[hazardass]

using RT-N66U with 380.70 (latest for this model)

I can view the per-device daily reports (pie charts), when I save traffic to RAM, but that's not very useful because it will be erased on reboot. If I save to a custom location, e.g. /cifs1/, then I cannot see the daily reports. The pie chart says "No Clients". And if I want to save to NMRAM, then i have to disable all per-device functionality altogether.

Are these limitations specific to the N66U model, or is it an issue with the firmware? Is there any way to enable daily reports when using a custom location?
Thank you.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Your screen shots are confusing. The top part shows the QoS Statistics tab, but the bottom part looks like the Traffic Monitor.

In your other thread you were having issues trying to save the Traffic Monitor data to a shared network drive on a PC. The kind of issue you're seeing now is the reason why that is not recommended. When the Traffic Monitor is initialised at boot time /cifs1 is just an empty read-only directory. It's much simpler to just plug a cheap USB flash drive into the router and be done with it. It's simpler and more reliable and doesn't require you having to leave your PC turned on 24 hours a day.

 

[hazardass]

Your screen shots are confusing. The top part shows the QoS Statistics tab, but the bottom part looks like the Traffic Monitor.

In your other thread you were having issues trying to save the Traffic Monitor data to a shared network drive on a PC. The kind of issue you're seeing now is the reason why that is not recommended. When the Traffic Monitor is initialised at boot time /cifs1 is just an empty read-only directory. It's much simpler to just plug a cheap USB flash drive into the router and be done with it. It's simpler and more reliable and doesn't require you having to leave your PC turned on 24 hours a day.

You are correct about the screenshot being from QOS. That's because the two screens look exactly the same. I'm attaching the one from the traffic monitor screen below. The pie chart is empty and shows "No clients" for some reason.

As to your other point, this is completely separate from the issue I had in another thread, which is the reason this is a new thread. Here I'm not even saving to an external location at all, so you are confusing the two. I'm saving to a custom location on the router (cifs1 folder), not anywhere else. So why would daily report per-device show "No clients" at all? It works fine with the RAM option., and the real-time per-device measure also works fine with custom.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I'm saving to a custom location on the router (cifs1 folder), not anywhere else. So why would daily report per-device show "No clients" at all? It works fine with the RAM option., and the real-time per-device measure also works fine with custom.

The real-time information is held in RAM and periodically saved to the custom location (based on the setting of "Save frequency") which is why that works. The daily/monthly data is read from the data file in the custom location. /cifs1 and all the other directories apart from /tmp are part of the ROM and therefore it is not possible to write files there. If you look in the router's syslog you should be able to see error messages related to rstats and cstats.

 

[hazardass]

You are correct, sir!
The log is full of "cstats[17145]: Problem loading /cifs1/tomato_cstats_40167e2e3d48.gz. Still trying... "

OK, so that's ROM. So, you are saying that the only way this can work when using a custom location, is if the location is external to the router, so in fact I would have to create a mounted network share. Is this correct?
Also, what does NVRAM refer to then? Is that memory on the router itself, and why doesn't that option even allow to enable IP traffic (per-IP) at all?
Thanks!

 

[ColinTaylor]

NVRAM is the non-volatile flash memory the router has where it stores it's configuration settings. It is quite small (64k) and is not designed to be constantly written to like a HDD or USB drive is. The daily/monthly summary data can be stored in NVRAM because it is very small. Anything extra stored in NVRAM takes away from the storage available for other router settings like DHCP reservations, SSH keys, VPN certificates, etc.

The IPTraffic (per IP monitoring) data takes up too much space to be stored in NVRAM and must be stored elsewhere.

If you want to preserve the Traffic Monitor data it is expected that you would store in on a flash drive (or HDD) plugged into one of the router's USB ports. This device would then be mounted on the router at /tmp/mnt/<devicename> as a writable directory.

 

[hazardass]

Colin, thanks for the detailed info.

One more general question. I'm a complete newbie, as you can prolly tell, and all I can do is maybe update the firmware and follow instructions for everything else that I see for the 1st time. It's finding those instructions that I struggle with, when it comes to using Merlins firmware. Learning how to do something is actually much easier than finding an explanation for how to do it. Merlin's wiki doesn't help with beginner's stuff.

So I go to the router settings and I sees the option for "Traffic monitoring" with different choices for"Traffic history location": RAM, NVRAM, and custom location. Where would I go to learn about the difference between the options? Merlin's wiki certainly doesn't cover basics like what you just told me, that all of the folders on the router except for /tmp/ are ROM and cannot be written on, so I cannot use something like /cifs1/ as a "custom location" without mounting it to an external folder. The router doesn't show me any error message or warning, when I select an invalid location, so that doesn't help. Or that NVRAM is very small and shouldn't be used for this or that. Or the way to create a folder in the root directory,is to first connect to the router using telnet, then using UNIX commands mkdir, etc etc etc. Merlink's wiki kind of assumes the user knows these things. So where do I go to learn the basics, so I don't have to ask beginner's questions on this forums?

I'm sure someone will say "there is google". Yes I've learned alot from scattered threads online (for example that WinSCP software makes it much easier to manage the router folders instead of using frustrating Unix commands). But those threads are not a guide, and not a way to really understand something. Is there a good resource for this?

That's also the one thing I would suggest to Merlin. If it's not possible to include basics in this wiki, it would really help to at least provide links.

Thank you!

 

[ColinTaylor]

That's a very good question, unfortunately I don't have a good answer.

I think if you look at the "Features" list in Merlin you will see that there's very little there that isn't a standard Linux-type package. It's just that Merlin's added them to the stock Asus firmware, or exposed additional options. The exceptions to this are probably DNS Filtering and Traffic Monitoring***.

Of course the real strength of Merlin's firmware (and others like Tomato, DD-WRT and OpenWRT) if the ability to get to the router's command line like a traditional Linux machine. However, unlike traditional Linux distro's, embedded devices like routers run from ROM and have very limited storage (NVRAM). Understandably this can be confusing to the novice, but again there's nothing here that is unique to Merlin, it's fairly standard stuff used by all of the "WRT"-like firmwares.

So in summary, there would be little point in having a Merlin-specific tutorial for the majority of these things (like Samba or OpenVPN or iptables). If you're getting into the low-level stuff then it is assumed you know your way around Linux. That will probably get you 90% of the way. The other 10% is familiarity with embedded Linux devices. Again this is not Merlin specific and applies equally to DD-WRT, etc. I don't know of a particular place where you can learn about embedded Linux because it's just stuff I've picked up over many years.

*** Doh! Looking again at the wiki entry for Traffic Monitor reminded me that there is of course another area of writable storage on the router that can be used as a location for the Traffic Monitor files, /jffs. One of the most significant changes that Merlin did to the original stock firmware was to make available to the user a previously unused area of NVRAM. This piece of NVRAM is much larger than the area used for storing the configuration settings, so it can be used for things like user scripts or data files. This new area of storage is formatted as a JFFS2 filesystem (rather than ext2 or FAT, etc.) and mounted at /jffs. So, as the wiki says, you can use this directory as your custom location instead of a USB storage device.

 

[hazardass]

I actually managed to save traffic to /cifs1/ which didn't work before, because I think I forgot to select "Create or reset IPTraffic data files" when I was creating the custom location. Now I see the daily per-device pie charts. So I don't think any of that space is ROM. I think you can create any custom folder under root/ and save to it.

To my other point about where I can learn about this, well, see, you know a lot more about this than a newbie like myself, but even you have to guess and speculate where exactly traffic data can be saves. Why is that? Because it's just not explained well.

I looked at the manual for the original Asus firmware, and of course I didn't find anything even related to this topic. It's the Merlin firmware that enables the option to save traffic data in different places, e.g. RAM/NVRAM/custom. So I do think the best place to learn about these options would be somewhere here on this site.

The page about Enhanced Traffic Monitoring touches on these things. For example, it says about RAM that the data will be erased on reboot. That's very useful to know because it means I shouldn't use RAM for this. But then things go downhill from there, when it comes to explaining the other options.

About custom location, it says "You can save it to a custom location (for example, "/jffs/", or /mnt/sda1/ if you have a USB disk plugged in (which is the recommended location)."
Basically it gives an example, without actually spelling out, in general, where the "custom location" can be created, and what are the limitations if any. You don't start and end a description with an example. You start with a general rule, and then maybe give some examples. But just giving one example of a custom location doesn't present a full picture of the possible places to save it.

What about the 3rd option, NVRAM. There is absolutely NOTHING mentioned about it in that part of the guide. First time I saw the option, I didn't even know what NVRAM meant. And an average user probably isn't expected to know that.

So it seems that "Enhanced Traffic Monitoring" section is in fact the right place to look for these things, but it's really lacking basic info adequate for the average non-techie user like me. I'm just an idiot with a router who wants to track the monthly data usage, that's all.

Some of the sections in the wiki have literally 2-3 sentences of general, non-speficic info which is really insufficient for someone like me. Again, I'm not saying all the detail should be there, but at the very least Merlin should provide links to reference other guides that can help a beginner.

I think Merlin's firmware is absolutely great! I just wish the user guide was on the same level.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I can sympathise with your comments. Technical documents tend to be written by techie's for techie's.

I actually managed to save traffic to /cifs1/ which didn't work before, because I think I forgot to select "Create or reset IPTraffic data files" when I was creating the custom location. Now I see the daily per-device pie charts. So I don't think any of that space is ROM. I think you can create any custom folder under root/ and save to it.

I'd double check that you are saving the data successfully, because unless you have somehow mounted a writable filesystem on top of /cifs1 it's definitely read-only. (Did you mount your Windows shared folder there?)

admin@RT-AC68U:/# touch /cifs1/xxxx
touch: /cifs1/xxxx: Read-only file system

admin@RT-AC68U:/# touch /cifs2/xxxx
touch: /cifs2/xxxx: Read-only file system

admin@RT-AC68U:/# touch /xxxx
touch: /xxxx: Read-only file system

admin@RT-AC68U:/# touch /tmp/xxxx

admin@RT-AC68U:/# mkdir /testdir
mkdir: can't create directory '/testdir': Read-only file system

admin@RT-AC68U:/#

 

[hazardass]

Yep it's true. I also just tried creating a new folder in root and got the read-only error.
Since /cifs1/ was already there I thought it may work because I did see the traffic history for a while. But now I rebooted the router and the data is gone which means it defaulted to RAM again, even though /cifs1/ was still selected as the save location. I guess it's not smart enough to tell me that that is an invalid location, or that it will use RAM instead. Sigh..

I"ll try /jffs/ as you suggested.

 

[hazardass]

OK, it seems that /jffs/ works. The daily report was still there after reboot. Thanks for the info.