Re: Marina base station coverage?

William P.N. Smith <news2006c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:

Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Shared DirecWay satellite] I was involved in setting up
the QoS system and SNMP based usage tracking and billing system. I
also attempted to concoct a version of the DirecWay FAP (fair access
policy) but failed.

To eliminate bickering, one of the residents wrote some Perl scripts
that produced monthly reports of every houses monthly traffic.

How difficult is something like that to set up? I'm involved in a
similar situation (shared 1.5M/768K DSL) and there's someone sucking
up most of it all the time...

Not too horrible. It's all based on MRTG. However, there are some
tricks. The DW7000 satellite terminal had to be setup as a bridge in
order to keep things simple. The router is a Cisco 2514 which really
should be replaced as it makes too much fan noise. When this mess
goes to cable modem speeds, the 2514 is going to be a bottleneck and
will need to be replaced.

I use SNMP and MRTG to gather per IP traffic statistics.
http://www.mrtg.org

The accumulated traffic graphs are setup to reset on the first of the
month and accumulate throughout the month. They look like a sawtooth
waveform. At the beginning of every month, a Perl script:
1. Archives the MRTG data files.
2. Creates new blank files.
3. Generates statistics and totals for each graph.
4. Conglomerates the numbers into a human readable report.
5. Grind some useful graphs like % of available bandwidth used by
each user.
6. Grab the monthly statistics from Hughesnet.
7. Presents a summary on a readable web page.
8. Generates a text file that is imported into an Excel spread***
to do the actual billing.
9. Whatever else I forgot.

I didn't write the scripts but I don't think you need them. Just find
some place in the systems (i.e. the router) for something that
supports SNMP and use MRTG to make pretty graphs. If you can't
replace the router, you can do it with a managed switch.

I have a dedicated laptop (Micron PII/300) running Red Hat 8 (yeah, I
know it's really old) that runs MRTG and collects the data from the
Cisco 2514. The built in battery is nice for power failures. The
laptop also runs a FreeRadius server to deal with security.
http://www.freeradius.org
This has been somewhat of a reliability problem as the Micron
ocassionally hangs and users cannot authenticate.

The laptop also runs a hacked version of MRTG pingprobe to track the
latency from the satellite link, which is useful for maintenance. The
biggest headache is saturating the uplink, so that traffic is measured
very carefully. I recently added a graph of signal strenght scraped
from the internal web server in the DW7000

I have a much simpler system in my office, which has 5 offices and
about 30 computers total sharing a single 1500/384 DSL line. I cheat
and use the numbers from a Cisco 1900 managed ethernet switch to
measure traffic per office. Again, it's SNMP and MRTG. There's no
per office accounting. I'm just looking for problems, history, and
usage patterns.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.