DD-WRT

With the fairly (no pun intended AT ALL) recent details about Comcast's latest endeavor to tighten the screws a little more against the consumers, I was curious about monitors or meters for those consumers to view the amount of usage.

There have been two lines of thought...and I can't confirm, completely, either but either:

1. Comcast will shut you down after 250GB/month for total bandwidth consumption
2. Or, you will be penalized for overages

Thinking to myself, "what can I do?", I decided to go after a way to monitor my own bandwidth.

Now, I have a couple of PCs running at the same time and do not want to get into a distributed solution. I need something as a hub for all of my PCs to consolidate to from a usage perspective.

Two options came to mind for me:

1. Set up a Linux box to use as a concentrator, if you will, for all of the network connections and sit between my wireless router (for the lappy worqs) and the cable modem
2. Or, figure out a solution on the router itself

I am a little Geek!y when it comes to Linux so that would not have been too big a deal - little iptables, ip forwarding, dual NICs, blah blah blah

But the really cool thing was... DD-WRT.

Here it the link to the main site:
Link

Hardware compatibility list:
Link

Lifehacker.com has a great write up on the install here:
Link

Example graphing for usage:

Luckily, I have the Linksys WRT-54 so I was good to go.



Now, I am able to track my usage - at least to the point that I trust the DD-WRT tools as opposed to the monitoring tools provided by the same provider as the consumable good...can you smell the conflict with that latter statement?

Enjoy