With Comcast having announced broadband bandwidth caps (high caps, but caps nonetheless) I decided to look for a decent solution to track my bandwidth usage.
Since the PS3 has become a major source of bandwidth usage (between 2 Gig demos, YouTube, the Video store and online gaming) and my son is up and coming (online gaming) with his own PC I wanted something central and easy and that, preferably, didn't require me to keep another system on to do it. So I naturally looked at the router - I've got an older, but oh-so-hackable LinkSys WRT54GSv4 (the v4 can be problematic - the v3 seems the beast to get if you can). I've been using the Talisman Basic (v1.1) Firmware by Sveasoft for years now so naturally I started there. Talisman is great - it offers a lot of features and by leveraging custom, focused versions provide pretty much anything anybody could want out of a router. But their licensing model is annoying: you need to by a $25/year "subscription" to download firmware or access support. Since this includes access to the USER support forums and they have utterly awful documentation I was rather annoyed: apparently I needed to pay for support to determine whether or not the newer version even did what I wanted! So, screw them. I went looking and found several alternatives - and, happily, all of them EXCEPT for Talisman are completely free. They had varying levels of support, documentation and so forth but I was immediately drawn to "Tomato". http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tomato_Firmware This firmware strives for simplicity without losing features. It's almost TOO simplistic as most screens are simple text with few controls making some of the more dense screens somewhat difficult to parse visually. But the firmware seems to be well-supported (the latest release was just about a month or two ago) and there were several rave reviews so I gave it a shot. The firmware does EVERYTHING I wanted an more. Primarily the features that made me initially look at alternative firmware are all present: static DNS, full QOS rules, Router hardware manipulation (gain boosting, reset behavior, etc), etc are all present and accounted for. There's also some nice-to-haves. For example Talisman (and the LinkSys stock firmware) allows you to create MAC Address filters for your wireless, but Tomato lets you include comments so you can easily note WHY your creating exceptions. In fact nearly all user-definable rules and exceptions allow you these "comments" fields. Tomato also allows you to create CIF profiles which allow the router to access PC share drives. In my case I created a share drive and my router is now happily saving logs and bandwidth information to this area every 12 hours (configurable). But the primary draw is the bandwidth monitor and it does exactly what I need, attractively. Using animated charts and graphs (available in FireFox only, although all report data is available via IE as well) you can explore your current bandwidth usage or review your history hourly, daily or monthly. Using the extensive QOS controls you can limit any device or service to usage or time caps and define priorities for resources. I can easily set up rules that gives online gaming or youTube precedence over UseNet downloads or HTTP. Everything's not perfect however. For all its simplicity there's not even token "help" provided, although the wikibook referenced above does an excellent job (and is unavailable when your router fails and you really need help). I also found some of the organization a bit odd, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I've also only used it for two days so I can't legitimately comment on its stability (so far things have been fine). If you're looking for a great way to track your usage, monitor your kids or just want more options with your network (and if your router is supported) Tomato - so far - is absolutely excellent. Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;203748912;27390454;j Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:267163 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
