home network monitoring and shaping
O oracle of nanog: unlike things like rogue processes eating tons of CPU, it seems to me that network monitoring is essentially a black art for the average schmuck home network operator (of which I count myself). That is: if the "network is slow", it's really hard to tell why that might be and who of the eleventy seven devices on my wifi is sucking the life out of my bandwidth. And then even if I get an idea of who the perp is, my remediation choice seems to be "find that device, smash it with sledge hammer". It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers. The ob-nanog is that "my intertoobs r slow" is most likely a call to your support desks which is expensive, of course. Is anything happening on this front? Is openwrt, for example, paying much attention to this problem? Mike
Someone created an application for uverse users that goes into the gateway and pulls relevant information. The information (link retrain, for example) is then color coded for caution and out of range. The application is called up real time, not something peddled by at&t to show how "great" your connection is. People unfortunately believe a speed test is a reliable way to measure a connection quality. There may be utilities out there like this that look at signal levels and statistics to tell the user their connection blows. I believe the uvrealtime application actually shows the provider sending resets as a deterrent for using bit torrent.
From my Android phone on T-Mobile. The first nationwide 4G network.
-------- Original message -------- From: Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> Date: 02/12/2013 1:57 PM (GMT-08:00) To: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: home network monitoring and shaping O oracle of nanog: unlike things like rogue processes eating tons of CPU, it seems to me that network monitoring is essentially a black art for the average schmuck home network operator (of which I count myself). That is: if the "network is slow", it's really hard to tell why that might be and who of the eleventy seven devices on my wifi is sucking the life out of my bandwidth. And then even if I get an idea of who the perp is, my remediation choice seems to be "find that device, smash it with sledge hammer". It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers. The ob-nanog is that "my intertoobs r slow" is most likely a call to your support desks which is expensive, of course. Is anything happening on this front? Is openwrt, for example, paying much attention to this problem? Mike
On 02/12/2013 02:07 PM, Warren Bailey wrote:
Someone created an application for uverse users that goes into the gateway and pulls relevant information. The information (link retrain, for example) is then color coded for caution and out of range. The application is called up real time, not something peddled by at&t to show how "great" your connection is. People unfortunately believe a speed test is a reliable way to measure a connection quality. There may be utilities out there like this that look at signal levels and statistics to tell the user their connection blows. I believe the uvrealtime application actually shows the provider sending resets as a deterrent for using bit torrent.
It would be nice for such a thing to tell me that my ISP connection is having trouble too, but I'm mostly interested in understanding the things that are nominally under my control on my home network. It seems that most routers have (gratuitous?) apps these day, but given the awfulness of their web UI's and their configurability, I don't have much hope that they do what I want. Mike
I'm quite happy with what routeros (mikrotik) provides me on my home network. - Eric Eric Adler Broadcast Engineer On 2/12/13, Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
O oracle of nanog: unlike things like rogue processes eating tons of CPU, it seems to me that network monitoring is essentially a black art for the average schmuck home network operator (of which I count myself). That is: if the "network is slow", it's really hard to tell why that might be and who of the eleventy seven devices on my wifi is sucking the life out of my bandwidth. And then even if I get an idea of who the perp is, my remediation choice seems to be "find that device, smash it with sledge hammer".
It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers.
The ob-nanog is that "my intertoobs r slow" is most likely a call to your support desks which is expensive, of course. Is anything happening on this front? Is openwrt, for example, paying much attention to this problem?
Mike
-- Sent from my mobile device
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 12/02/2013 21:56, Michael Thomas wrote:
It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers.
I've been using per-connection queues on a Mikrotik 450G; this permits shaping based on the destination/source IP, so no one device can nom all of the bandwidth on the link unless it's uncontested; should more than one device want all the bandwidth they both get half, and so on (in a typical config). It's not flawless but it's a massive improvement on no shaping whatsoever. The gotcha is that you need to configure your link speed in the router for it to be aware of the capacity it has to play with, but that's not something you have to touch very often most of the time (though if your connection speed/upstream capacity varies, there's not a lot that'll help you at that point. But it does most of the time stop the "X is watching HD YouTube videos and now I can't check my email" sort of problems. It's a nice set-and-forget solution. ntop or similar on a Linux boxen in concert with flows from said Mikrotik tends to help more than anything for analysis of usage etc, but it's still an inelelegant solution to the problem of analyzing links in this scenario. I'd be interested in what other people are using for home connection debugging. Cheers, James -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.17 (MingW32) iEYEARECAAYFAlEa2esACgkQ22kkGnnJQAyFnwCfcaq95/Nd1iNk4Fj/j6jSB98A fEsAn3CIgoizBZjPbTTwlQPS+iKccx2Q =FUhz -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
I've had great luck with Cisco's fair-queue option (and similar techniques). Using RED, small queues (think on the order of 10-20 packets), and creating a choke point in and out of the network, I've implemented similar behavior on plenty of DSL lines on the CPE-side. My most successful was sharing one 7mbps line with 120 technical employees - before the implementation of improved queuing, web pages took 60 seconds or more to load during peak usage. After implementation, people didn't know they were on a shared DSL unless they tried streaming video (fortunately not a business requirement) or a bulk download (it worked fine, it just would be slow if there were several others going on at the same time). I suspect I could have even made a VoIP call across the line with a MOS in the high 3's easily. A second issue is poor wireless retransmission and buffering implementations in consumer wireless. For my home, to make VoIP work with low-end gear, I had to break most HTTP sessions and switch to a delay-based congestion control algorithm inside my network - due to the 5+ second buffers on the wifi gear. That would probably have been enough, but turning on WMM really took the rest of the pain out of wifi-VoIP. I don't know how to fix the home wifi problems (WMM helps with some applications, certainly, but it's not a full solution if you still have 5 second buffers in the default traffic class). But for the other problems, it would be nice if my provider didn't give me huge buffers and no RED on the output queue (I have no idea if they are doing the best they can with the gear they have or not, so there may not be any option here). But, even without that, home routers can do better than they do now. My router knows what speed it's connected at. It can create an internal bottleneck slightly slower, prioritize small packets, implement RED, and use reasonably-sized buffers (fast downloads should not increase ping times by hundreds of ms). I shouldn't need to hang a Linux box between it and my home network. Large buffers have broken the average home internet. I can't tell you how many people are astonished when I say "one of your family members downloading a huge Microsoft ISO image (via TCP or other congestion-aware algorithm) shouldn't even be noticed by another family member doing web browsing. If it is noticed, the network is broke. Even if it's at the end of a slow DSL line."
On 02/12/2013 04:46 PM, Joel Maslak wrote:
Large buffers have broken the average home internet. I can't tell you how many people are astonished when I say "one of your family members downloading a huge Microsoft ISO image (via TCP or other congestion-aware algorithm) shouldn't even be noticed by another family member doing web browsing. If it is noticed, the network is broke. Even if it's at the end of a slow DSL line."
This is true only to a point: if you have 5 people streaming movies on a 2 people broadband you're going to have problems regardless of the queuing discipline. That said, it's pretty awful that in this day and age that router vendors can't be bothered to set the default linux kernel queuing parameters to something reasonable. In any case, my point was really about wanting to deal with what happens when your isp bandwidth is saturated and being able to track it down and/or kill off the offenders. I haven't bought a router in the last year or two as "apps" have become de rigueur, but it sure seems like it would be nice to be able to do that. I'm pretty sure that I still can't (= being a dumb consumer, not a net geek jockey), but would like to hear otherwise. Mike
I've had good luck with a via mini ITX board and http://ipcop.org/ This was in 2005 so things may have changed/progressed. It wasn't hard to give out some static dhcp leases and look at graphs and see who the bandwidth piggies were, and then set some throttling. Housemates weren't kicking down any money for the DSL line and running p2p sharing apps... Not good for latency sensitive gaming! Sean On 2/13/13 9:40 AM, Michael Thomas wrote:
On 02/12/2013 04:46 PM, Joel Maslak wrote:
Large buffers have broken the average home internet. I can't tell you how many people are astonished when I say "one of your family members downloading a huge Microsoft ISO image (via TCP or other congestion-aware algorithm) shouldn't even be noticed by another family member doing web browsing. If it is noticed, the network is broke. Even if it's at the end of a slow DSL line."
This is true only to a point: if you have 5 people streaming movies on a 2 people broadband you're going to have problems regardless of the queuing discipline. That said, it's pretty awful that in this day and age that router vendors can't be bothered to set the default linux kernel queuing parameters to something reasonable.
In any case, my point was really about wanting to deal with what happens when your isp bandwidth is saturated and being able to track it down and/or kill off the offenders. I haven't bought a router in the last year or two as "apps" have become de rigueur, but it sure seems like it would be nice to be able to do that. I'm pretty sure that I still can't (= being a dumb consumer, not a net geek jockey), but would like to hear otherwise.
Mike
On 2/12/2013 4:10 PM, James Harrison wrote:
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On 12/02/2013 21:56, Michael Thomas wrote:
It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers.
I've been using per-connection queues on a Mikrotik 450G; this permits shaping based on the destination/source IP, so no one device can nom all of the bandwidth on the link unless it's uncontested; should more than one device want all the bandwidth they both get half, and so on (in a typical config). It's not flawless but it's a massive improvement on no shaping whatsoever.
The gotcha is that you need to configure your link speed in the router for it to be aware of the capacity it has to play with, but that's not something you have to touch very often most of the time (though if your connection speed/upstream capacity varies, there's not a lot that'll help you at that point. But it does most of the time stop the "X is watching HD YouTube videos and now I can't check my email" sort of problems. It's a nice set-and-forget solution.
ntop or similar on a Linux boxen in concert with flows from said Mikrotik tends to help more than anything for analysis of usage etc, but it's still an inelelegant solution to the problem of analyzing links in this scenario. I'd be interested in what other people are using for home connection debugging.
Cheers, James
For Mikrotik routers, use the Winbox application and the Torch function on the interface. You can set it to show flows by various criteria such as source IP. That will tell you which client is chewing up the bandwidth at any instant. Another way to go that I have not tried with Mikrotik is the Solarwinds Netflow analyzer. It tracks 60 minutes of data. http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/netflow_analyzer.aspx
I'd be interested in what other people are using for home connection debugging.
I put the teenager behind a 10Mb hub & haven't had any problems since :) Regards, Lee On 2/12/13, James Harrison <james@talkunafraid.co.uk> wrote:
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On 12/02/2013 21:56, Michael Thomas wrote:
It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers.
I've been using per-connection queues on a Mikrotik 450G; this permits shaping based on the destination/source IP, so no one device can nom all of the bandwidth on the link unless it's uncontested; should more than one device want all the bandwidth they both get half, and so on (in a typical config). It's not flawless but it's a massive improvement on no shaping whatsoever.
The gotcha is that you need to configure your link speed in the router for it to be aware of the capacity it has to play with, but that's not something you have to touch very often most of the time (though if your connection speed/upstream capacity varies, there's not a lot that'll help you at that point. But it does most of the time stop the "X is watching HD YouTube videos and now I can't check my email" sort of problems. It's a nice set-and-forget solution.
ntop or similar on a Linux boxen in concert with flows from said Mikrotik tends to help more than anything for analysis of usage etc, but it's still an inelelegant solution to the problem of analyzing links in this scenario. I'd be interested in what other people are using for home connection debugging.
Cheers, James -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.17 (MingW32)
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I vote pfSense.. don't skimp on the NIC's when you build one out (Intel ftw). My $0.02.. Gino On 2/12/13 1:56 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
O oracle of nanog: unlike things like rogue processes eating tons of CPU, it seems to me that network monitoring is essentially a black art for the average schmuck home network operator (of which I count myself). That is: if the "network is slow", it's really hard to tell why that might be and who of the eleventy seven devices on my wifi is sucking the life out of my bandwidth. And then even if I get an idea of who the perp is, my remediation choice seems to be "find that device, smash it with sledge hammer".
It seems that there really ought to be a better way here to manage my home network. Like, for example, the ability to get stats from router and tell it to shape various devices/flows to play nice. Right now, it seems to me that the state of the art is pretty bad -- static-y kinds of setups for static-y kinds of flows that people-y kind of users don't understand or touch on their home routers.
The ob-nanog is that "my intertoobs r slow" is most likely a call to your support desks which is expensive, of course. Is anything happening on this front? Is openwrt, for example, paying much attention to this problem?
Mike
participants (9)
-
Eric Adler -
g＠1337.io -
James Harrison -
Joel Maslak -
Lee -
Michael Thomas -
Roy -
Sean Lazar -
Warren Bailey