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Measuring bandwidth through router

CycophantCycophant Registered User regular
I know there's a way to do this, I just don't know how, or if it's possible with the basic router that I have, but here goes:

I live with two other roommates. We all have our own computers, and use the internet a fair bit. The problem is that internet up here in the arctic is stupidly expensive ($90 for 15 gigs of transfer a month, and $10/gig after that). We almost always end up paying around $150 a month because of overages. We're all sick of paying so much and assuming it's everybody else that's using all the bandwidth.

So essentially, I'd like to know if it's possible to monitor the bandwidth being used through our router and track it via IP or DHCP list or something, so we could tell exactly who was using what. I'm certain this is possible, but I imagine it's not something that's easy to do with your stereotypical wireless router used in the home.

Does anybody know of a piece of software that can do this? Or alternatively, if there is such an option on a relatively inexpensive router I could purchase?

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Cycophant on

Posts

  • travathiantravathian Registered User regular
    edited July 2009
    Software on your PC won't do it because your PC won't see packets destined for the other computers. Your router may have 3rd party firmware available for it that allows such information to be gathered (examples are DD-WRT, Tomato, Gargoyle, OpenWRT). The other option is to use an older computer as your router. Toss on a version of linux and load the appropriate tools, but this will require quite a bit of work. A final option might be to simply go into the router and see if anyone is doing any port forwarding of common filesharing ports, that would let you know who has P2P going on. Or if you want to truly get ugly, you can simply start doing mass port blocking or create a whitelist of only necessary ports.

    travathian on
  • lilBlilB Registered User regular
    edited July 2009
    I have a linksys running Tomato. Sweet setup and very easy to use. Tracks monthly bandwidth usage and displays real time graphs. Just grab a router that is compatible and flash it with the CORRECT firmware :)

    lilB on
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