Limiting Daily Bandwidth on a Home Network with Gargoyle Raised By Turtles.After a few years of dealing with continual problems with bandwidth limits on our satellite internet network, it was imperative to find a way to institute daily bandwidth limits.When we dont do that, guests who stay at our vacation rental at the beginning of the month can use up all the bandwidth so that theres none left for guests at the end of the month, which makes for unhappy people.Gargoyle firmware, which can be installed on any Open.WRT compatible router was, in the end, an easy solution.I settled on the Netgear WNDR3.Bandwidth Monitoring Software For Router' title='Bandwidth Monitoring Software For Router' />The Multi Router Traffic Grapher MRTG is free software for monitoring and measuring the traffic load on network links.It allows the user to see traffic load on a.Ill explain in a bit.The Problem. We started offering internet to guests at our vacation rental in 2.Network monitoring software that is easytouse and affordable.Allows you to monitor routers, switches, and virtual servers.Download 30day free trial.New list of Server Monitoring Application Performance Monitoring APM Solutions.Replaces my original list of APM tools.Listed in alphabetical order.Weve previously recommended Networx for monitoring your bandwidth usage.Its a free Windows application that allows you to monitor the bandwidth used by.The problem is that we are on a satellite internet system which limits monthly usage.Our old provider,Wildblue, only gave us 7.GB. We switched to a new provider, Hughesnet, who gives us 1.GB of anytime bytes and 1.GB of bonus bytes for use between 2am and 8am.Hughesnet also gives you a 5.MB token every month you stay within your limit and you can bank those tokens indefinitely.To anyone in the city this is laughable, but this is the highest level service plan we can get in our area, and yet our total monthly bandwidth allowance is about what most people get for their average daily allotment by comparison most DSL providers allow 2.GBmonth in their Fair Access Policy.To put this in perspective, a single 1.Netflix movie in HD is going to suck up about 4.MB 4. 5. GB of data.A single hour of Netflixs highest definition video is 7.GB Thus, a single movie is basically half of the months total for us.Over the years, this has created a lot of challenges to offering internet to guests and its gotten much worse with the advent of i.Pads. Some of the things weve seen The heavy user problem.Guests who use the entire months worth of data in two days, leaving nothing for future guests.We have had to pay up to 7.GB in a couple of days.It turned out he was doing tons of video transfer.The i. Padi. Phone problem.A guest on the network who used almost the equivalent of a days allotment in 8.Pad. That made no sense because email is very low bandwidth.It so happened, because I was helping him connect, I could see what was happening in real time.The second he connected to the network, his i.Pad started using 8.MBs and he wasnt even doing anything.We didnt figure it out at first, because I dont have an i.Pad, but Theresa guessed that he had a lot of apps running.If you dont actively shut down an app on an i.Pad it continues to run in the background.Sure enough, when he checked, he had 2.Facebook, email, Words with Friends, and a bunch of others.Almost all of these apps were querying the internet constantly, with the net effect that while he burned 2 3.MB readin his email, his i.Pad burned another 2.MB in the background just updating those apps.It gets even worse if someone has been traveling and hasnt connected the table in a long time in that case the tablet is also going to download all the app updates.They dont do this over a 3.G or 4. G data connection, because they are trying to conserve bandwidth.Then they connect to our network and have a weeks worth of updates.The lack of technology knowledge problem.We had one guest who wanted to check email.Theresa was explaining that if they downloaded video, they would run out of bandwidth.She said Oh, we wont do anything like that.The girls might just want to watch a couple of Netflix movies.OuchThat would use all the bandwidth for the month.The lawbreaker problem.Not related to bandwidth, but we have also received letters from HBO lawyers on three occasions threatening legal action because guests on our network were engaged in illegal file sharing of HBO copyrighted materials.These problems are bad enough that I know of two rentals in the neighborhood who this year quite offering guest access.So the solution Ive been seeking for years has been something that would let me divide up the monthly bandwidth into daily segments so that guests from the beginning of the month cant ruin it for guests at the end of the month.Ive pored over spec sheets for routers for years, and have never found one that lets you do that.Enter Gargoyle. After a lot of research, it turns out that if you get a router that allows you to upgrade the firmware, you can gain a lot of control.Broadly speaking, there were two options.First, there are many services that let you set up a wireless hotspot, like at your local cafe or airport.This is way more complexity than I wanted and many of these solutions quickly become quite expensive.Second, there is Gargoyle, a free, open source firmware based on Open.Wrt that lets you do exactly what I want.Any router that will run Open.Wrt should let you run Gargoyle.As it turns out, none of my three routers home network, rental network, and an old router that Ive got kicking around are built to allow you to upgrade the firmware.Finding a Router.Most of your cheap consumer routers will upgrade their own firmware, but you cant put Open.Wrt on them. Open. Bluetooth Software For Dell Inspiron 1545 For Windows 8 . Wrt is actually a full Linux distribution designed to run routers.So you need a router that is, in short, a fairly capable computer in its own right.This crosses the vast majority of routers off the list, but there remain a huge number of routers that can run Open.Wrt, ranging from major enterprise level systems costing hundreds, even thousands, of dollars, to ones that are barely more expensive than that cheapo router you would buy at Best Buy.Gargoyles list of supported routers is disappointingly small.It also turns out to be way outdated.If you go to the downloads section, youll find that there are hundreds of image files.These are files that are built for a specific model of router and can be flashed straight onto your router.That said, finding the one for your router can be tough.The download lists are based on architecture meaning the chipset your router uses.So first you have to figure out whether you have a Atheros AR7.Broadcom, Atheros 2.X5. 31. 2, or AlixX8.Then you have to figure out which version of the chipset, then you can try to find your router on the list of routers.You of course already have all that information at hand, right If youre going to use an existing router, Ill just say that youll have to do some research.I was buying a new router.I ended up with the Netgear WNDR3.Im really happy with it.Ive recommended it to two other friends with a total of five vacation rentals and theyve all gotten one.We have two up and running and I just got the third one delivered yesterday and Ill set that up today or tomorrow.I started looking for a router with a few criteria in mind.Reasonably modern.Many of the officially supported routers are ancient and missing many features we now expect from routers.I dont want a 1. The Netgear WNDR3.Its an N6. 00 3. Mbps on both channels and has everything else I would want.Pre built image available.I dont want to build from source or any of that.There was an image for the WNDR3.More importantly, the predecessor, the WNDR3.Gargoyle, whereas the WNDR3.Good reviews online.The first router we had for our rental basically wouldnt let anyone connect.It was a constant hassle trying to get people online.So I didnt want problems like that.Honestly, the WNDR3.Looking at router reviews, though, very few of them are well informed and often give 1 star for fairly spurious reasons.So the reviews werent great, but many of the complaints were not well grounded and in any case, the other routers that were compatible with Gargoyle had either similar reviews or wildly higher price tags.Unbrickable. It is possible of you screw up the firmware update that you can brick your router, meaning place it in a completely unrecoverable state such that it wont boot up enough to even restore the factory firmware.Throw it out and buy a new router.Some routers have a reset button.If you totally screw it up, hit the reset button and youre back to factory defaults.The WNDR3. 80. 0 has this all important feature for the neophyte network tech.In the end, I never had to do a reset on it, but I felt reassured just know that I could.I did, while messing around with all this, mess up one of my other routers and had to do the factory reset so it does happen Reasonable price.Routers that run Gargoyle are often 2.Im sure theyre worth it.The Netgear WNDR3.
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