William Hook’s Blog

As I recently switched to Be Unlimited, as my ISP, I decided that I’d like to monitor my bandwidth usage more carefully then I did with BT - when I was on BT, I was pretty much downloading as much as I could and not taking any note of how much I downloaded. However, I’d like to keep a better eye on it, and, if I get to about 200-250GB or so, for that specific month, I plan on probably slowing down a little.

Anyway, to do this, I had several options:

1) Guess.
2) Install bandwidth monitoring software on all the PCs in the house.
3) Monitor it via the router.

Point one, of course, would be very inaccurate. Point two would be okay, but it would be a hassle to setup on all the PCs in my house, two of which (my dad’s laptops) are not used on my network in the week, so, of course, it would have to only count data on the weekend. Plus, I can’t exactly install software like that on my PlayStation 3, can I? Overall, not a very easy solution.

This leaves option 3 - monitor bandwidth usage via a router. Sadly, not many routers do this by default that I know of, and if they do, it’s usually 1) reset when you reboot the router, and 2) very basic, eg, a simple “10GB” for your entire network. Sure, it tells you you’ve downloaded 10GB, but that’s it.

The Thompson box that Be provide you with (the “Be Box”) can tell you how much you’ve done, however I found that it seemed to either drop the connection or reboot every 24 hours or so, which was irritating. Of course, when it did this, it lost the figure. Plus the interface is, well…horrific, and it lacks any advanced features at all. In fact, I was suprised that it actually could connect to the internet… Anyway, my old Linksys router that I used with BT didn’t have any such bandwidth figure either, in fact, I don’t think any of Linksys’ routers actually have any sort of bandwidth monitor in them, which is a pity.

Also, the reason I didn’t upgrade my old Linksys WAG200G, is because it’s not based on a Broadcom chip, so it can’t run all these different firmware packages, which is a pity. However, I’m still using it, but only as the modem at the moment.

So, I decided to purchase a router with the intention of loading DD-WRT onto it. Having previously owned a Linksys WRT54G in Australia, and running DD-WRT on it, I did a little research. Sadly, Linksys have revised the WRT54G since I got mine several years ago and according to DD-WRT’s Wiki, the newer revisions are a bit iffy. So, I decided to get the WRT54GL. It’s basically the 4th revision of the WRT54G, but designed specificially for Linux-based 3rd party firmware, if you so wish to. Of course, it comes with a Linksys firmware by default but it can easily run 3rd party firmware if you so wish.

Anyway, I went ahead and got the WRT54GL from Overclockers UK, and it arrived on Monday. I unpacked it, plugged it in, and flashed it with DD-WRT v24. However, after poking around a little, DD-WRT seems to be lacking any decent bandwidth monitoring options, and, v24 seems to be a total pig compared to what I remember v23 being on my old router. So, as a few people had scorned me in Be’s IRC channel, I decided to download and install Tomato, which is another firmware for the WRT54GL (and others) that is apperantly very light. However, what most impressed me is that I had seen a demo of the bandwidth features on an episode of Systm.

So, I installed Tomato, and, what a difference. The whole interface seems much more polished then DD-WRT is, it’s a lot snappier and more responsive, and the bandwidth monitoring is great, and from poking around it quite a bit, I like it much more then DD-WRT. Another thing that I simply love is that you can setup “static DHCP” based on a device’s MAC address. Don’t know what that is? Well, you can have it so that all your devices connect via DHCP (which is easier), however Tomato will *always* hand out a specific IP that you choose to that device. For example, I’ve set it up so my devices will always have these IP addresses:

192.168.1.1: Router
192.168.1.2: AirPort Express
192.168.1.3: La Fonera Router
192.168.1.4: Thecus NAS
192.168.1.5: iMac
192.168.1.6: iPhone
192.168.1.7: PS3
192.168.1.8: Chumby
192.168.1.9: HDDVD Player

…but any additional devices that try and connect will be handed out a standard IP from the DHCP range, in my case, 192.168.1.100 and up. This is very handy if you can’t be bothered changing the settings on each seperate device, as it puts the control it one central location.

This of course is only a small selection of the features, and there are plenty more. One annoyance I’ve found with Tomato is there’s no built in manual or help or anything - for example, both the Linksys firmware and DD-WRT used to have a help section on the right, which was handy. Tomato has no such thing. However, there is a handy guide located here, which is nice for beginners.

Overall, Tomato has a very nice look, is very light, and still has plenty of features. If you have a WRT54GL, or another supported router, I highly recommend upgrading it.

Couple of screenshots:

As you can see, too, Tomato includes a small selection of templates so you can change the colours and so on. Plus, if you want to, you can make your own.