5 ms·

Maybe a bit of a tangent but does anyone have a good recommendation for monitoring a networks upness? My home internet suffers quite a bit at random times, some

Maybe a bit of a tangent but does anyone have a good recommendation for monitoring a networks upness? My home internet suffers quite a bit at random times, sometimes it's very local (noise between repeaters on my telephone line) and sometimes it's 2 or 3 hops away. I've taken to running mtr during problem times so I can have a beat on the flakiness as that informs me how much it will affect work/gaming/browsing, but it's not so great of a tool to run constantly and look back at historical data. I'd really rather have something that can log, doesn't even have to graph it. The problems I encounter go anywhere from blips of one way packet loss (I've been able to ping my IP from a server but not ping the same server from my apartment), latency randomly jumping 500ms, or full downtime. mtr is better than ping for this as I like to see whether the issue is happening on my line or further out, that usually informs how much noise I should make or how much time I have to kill.

prettyStandard 5y ago
I've used this. It's not everything I want but it's something I can show to the cable internet techs. https://loggger.com https://loggger.com
maicro 5y ago
Sibling comment looks interesting, but two other options I've used are A) https://testmy.net/auto https://testmy.net/auto which lets you set up scheduled speed tests, and B) some manual hacky scripts running via cron on a Raspberry Pi. The latter is useful because you can run whatever combination of tests you want - there are CLI programs that run on a Pi for bandwidth/speed testing (I think speedtest.net has one specifically, but there are others, including at least one other that targets speedtest.net), mtr/traceroute/ping/etc. etc. can all be scripted, and if you get a bit clever with your pipes and sed scripts, you can end up with a file that can be directly loaded into a spreadsheet program for plotting (or you could go all-out and have the script generate a plot.ly plot directly). I've also plotted ambient temperature here, to maybe find any correlations. What might be the most useful for you is to find a metric on your router/modem that provides some value - years ago I was able to find a signal quality metric on my DSL modem that I could record programmatically (simple API call with a the simplest HTTP password encryption option...), which eventually lead to discovering that there were line filters/attenuators that had been installed but not removed for the different seasons.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
So if you have copper cable phone lines to your telecoms cabinet (typical UK BT OpenReach setup not Virgin Cable), disconnecting any and all your phone extension sockets in the property and having your router plugged into the master socket can see a doubling of speed! Its possible to have router establish a speed that is faster than your broadband package offers, so you will be throttled back to the speed you are paying for. Some routers will also highlight if there is interference on the line, which makes it harder to calculate how long the cable from your property to the cabinet can be. Some routers will also show who the cabinet manufacturer is and firmware version, usually Broadcom or reportedly Huawei, but I've not found a Huawei cabinet yet. I've found German routers to be best. The new cabinets also reportedly emit an independent radio signal in case the line to the cabinet goes down which might also be used to detect when someone has opened the cabinet. Anyone could mess around with the older telecoms cabinets! So monitoring the RF with a SDR could throw up more interesting data. And then its off to your exchange where companies like TalkTalk also run their own cabling so you may not be on the BT OpenReach network, especially if you are a TalkTalk customer. I'm not aware of ISP using both OpenReach and TalkTalk but some arrangements might exist. And then from there, if the problem is not between your exchange and your property, then sometimes using a VPN service into another country can help for those situations where the usual route to your popular sites are congested/problematic, ie VPN to a different country so that you can come in to the US from the West coast instead of the East coast, or VPN to German in order to access a Swiss website, instead of France to Switzerland. (Submarine) Cable maps can be handy for working out the countries to VPN into to get a different route into a country and thus favoured websites.
- marcusjt 5y ago
  In addition to the above advice about copper/ADSL, if any of your sockets are still live after unplugging whatever you can and/or you actually want to use a phone, you should also plug filters into ALL of your live sockets (whether they have something plugged into them or not). For the ultimate, cleanest & best connection you can remove the faceplate of the master socket to reveal the "test socket" [1] (which in so doing disconnects every other socket in the house) and then plug a filter & your ADSL modem directly into that socket, or fit a replacement faceplate e.g. [2],[3] [1] http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/bt-master-socket-nte5.shtml http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/bt-master-socket-nte5.shtml [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/N247-ADSL-FacePlate-Filter/dp/B0030BC2PW https://www.amazon.co.uk/N247-ADSL-FacePlate-Filter/dp/B0030... [3] https://www.run-it-direct.co.uk/adsl-vdsl-faceplates/vte2015filteredfaceplate/ https://www.run-it-direct.co.uk/adsl-vdsl-faceplates/vte2015...
sschueller 5y ago
I have been running the official speed test cli script from ookla directly on my opnsense router and dumping the json output into a database. The script runs every 15 minutes and gives me an idea how my ISP is performing. https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli
traceroute66 5y ago
> My home internet suffers quite a bit at random times If you are in the UK, just move your home broadband to Andrews & Arnold[1]. They are an ISP that know their stuff, have a knowledgable helpdesk and run 24x7 diagonstics on every line of every customer and make that data available to the customer[2]. No I don't work for them. No I'm not a shill. But I have sufficient techie colleagues in the UK who vouch for A&A being tip top. Alternatively, if you have control of a remote server, you could try running IRTT [3] and feeding it into your favourite graphing/monitoring software is. [1]https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/ [2]https://support.aa.net.uk/CQM_Graphs https://support.aa.net.uk/CQM_Graphs [3]https://github.com/heistp/irtt https://github.com/heistp/irtt
dmuth 5y ago
I built something which may be able to help: https://github.com/dmuth/grafana-playground https://github.com/dmuth/grafana-playground You'll want to spin this up in Docker Compose, and to add custom hosts upstream of you (such as ISP routers), you can edit the hosts.txt file (to add in human-friendly names such as "upstream") and add those hosts in the HOSTS variable in the docker-compose.yml file. Feel free to open an issue on the project or reach out privately if you have any questions.

prettyStandard 5y ago

I've used this. It's not everything I want but it's something I can show to the cable internet techs. https://loggger.com https://loggger.com

maicro 5y ago

Sibling comment looks interesting, but two other options I've used are A) https://testmy.net/auto https://testmy.net/auto which lets you set up scheduled speed tests, and B) some manual hacky scripts running via cron on a Raspberry Pi. The latter is useful because you can run whatever combination of tests you want - there are CLI programs that run on a Pi for bandwidth/speed testing (I think speedtest.net has one specifically, but there are others, including at least one other that targets speedtest.net), mtr/traceroute/ping/etc. etc. can all be scripted, and if you get a bit clever with your pipes and sed scripts, you can end up with a file that can be directly loaded into a spreadsheet program for plotting (or you could go all-out and have the script generate a plot.ly plot directly). I've also plotted ambient temperature here, to maybe find any correlations. What might be the most useful for you is to find a metric on your router/modem that provides some value - years ago I was able to find a signal quality metric on my DSL modem that I could record programmatically (simple API call with a the simplest HTTP password encryption option...), which eventually lead to discovering that there were line filters/attenuators that had been installed but not removed for the different seasons.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

So if you have copper cable phone lines to your telecoms cabinet (typical UK BT OpenReach setup not Virgin Cable), disconnecting any and all your phone extension sockets in the property and having your router plugged into the master socket can see a doubling of speed! Its possible to have router establish a speed that is faster than your broadband package offers, so you will be throttled back to the speed you are paying for. Some routers will also highlight if there is interference on the line, which makes it harder to calculate how long the cable from your property to the cabinet can be. Some routers will also show who the cabinet manufacturer is and firmware version, usually Broadcom or reportedly Huawei, but I've not found a Huawei cabinet yet. I've found German routers to be best. The new cabinets also reportedly emit an independent radio signal in case the line to the cabinet goes down which might also be used to detect when someone has opened the cabinet. Anyone could mess around with the older telecoms cabinets! So monitoring the RF with a SDR could throw up more interesting data. And then its off to your exchange where companies like TalkTalk also run their own cabling so you may not be on the BT OpenReach network, especially if you are a TalkTalk customer. I'm not aware of ISP using both OpenReach and TalkTalk but some arrangements might exist. And then from there, if the problem is not between your exchange and your property, then sometimes using a VPN service into another country can help for those situations where the usual route to your popular sites are congested/problematic, ie VPN to a different country so that you can come in to the US from the West coast instead of the East coast, or VPN to German in order to access a Swiss website, instead of France to Switzerland. (Submarine) Cable maps can be handy for working out the countries to VPN into to get a different route into a country and thus favoured websites.

marcusjt 5y ago
In addition to the above advice about copper/ADSL, if any of your sockets are still live after unplugging whatever you can and/or you actually want to use a phone, you should also plug filters into ALL of your live sockets (whether they have something plugged into them or not). For the ultimate, cleanest & best connection you can remove the faceplate of the master socket to reveal the "test socket" [1] (which in so doing disconnects every other socket in the house) and then plug a filter & your ADSL modem directly into that socket, or fit a replacement faceplate e.g. [2],[3] [1] http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/bt-master-socket-nte5.shtml http://www.hmmm.ip3.co.uk/bt-master-socket-nte5.shtml [2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/N247-ADSL-FacePlate-Filter/dp/B0030BC2PW https://www.amazon.co.uk/N247-ADSL-FacePlate-Filter/dp/B0030... [3] https://www.run-it-direct.co.uk/adsl-vdsl-faceplates/vte2015filteredfaceplate/ https://www.run-it-direct.co.uk/adsl-vdsl-faceplates/vte2015...

sschueller 5y ago

I have been running the official speed test cli script from ookla directly on my opnsense router and dumping the json output into a database. The script runs every 15 minutes and gives me an idea how my ISP is performing. https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

traceroute66 5y ago

> My home internet suffers quite a bit at random times If you are in the UK, just move your home broadband to Andrews & Arnold[1]. They are an ISP that know their stuff, have a knowledgable helpdesk and run 24x7 diagonstics on every line of every customer and make that data available to the customer[2]. No I don't work for them. No I'm not a shill. But I have sufficient techie colleagues in the UK who vouch for A&A being tip top. Alternatively, if you have control of a remote server, you could try running IRTT [3] and feeding it into your favourite graphing/monitoring software is. [1]https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/ [2]https://support.aa.net.uk/CQM_Graphs https://support.aa.net.uk/CQM_Graphs [3]https://github.com/heistp/irtt https://github.com/heistp/irtt

dmuth 5y ago

I built something which may be able to help: https://github.com/dmuth/grafana-playground https://github.com/dmuth/grafana-playground You'll want to spin this up in Docker Compose, and to add custom hosts upstream of you (such as ISP routers), you can edit the hosts.txt file (to add in human-friendly names such as "upstream") and add those hosts in the HOSTS variable in the docker-compose.yml file. Feel free to open an issue on the project or reach out privately if you have any questions.