Last week some time some people on the LUGOR (Linux Users Group Of Rochester) mailing list were discussing Time Warner’s new tiered bandwidth pricing plan and naturally the question came up “how do I measure the bandwidth I’m using if I have multiple computers behind my router”. Somebody mentioned the “Tomato” firmware for Linksys WRT54G routers as having some nifty functionality, including graphs of bandwidth use, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Last Wednesday I downloaded the firmware and attempted to install it, but each time I got a message telling me that the firmware upload had failed. So I thought nothing of it. Sunday, my router rebooted because of UPS problems. Monday, I noticed that I couldn’t reach my home web server. So Monday night when I got home from kayaking I logged into the admin console for my router, only to find it’s now running Tomato. Tomato evidently managed to grab all my settings from the old firmware except the port forwarding. But I quickly fixed that, and now I’m getting nifty graphs of bandwidth use. Nifty.
I’ve been using Tomato for a while, now. I like it. It’s also faster than sveasoft’s firmware in throwing around packets (at least my throughput on FIOS was marginally higher).
Stephen, I wish my cable service was fast enough that the firmware speed actually meant something.
The last ISP I was on limited me to 100 Gigs a month (which I rarely ever came close to) but provided fairly easy to access online graphs that showed bandwidth usage. If you registered your email address the system would also email you when you were getting close to your limits.
Both systems were not realtime (24 hours behind, apparently) but served the purpose.
I might have to checkout that firmware. I’m a WRT54G user as well.