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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

While we're on an OpenWrt thread: what's the best way if any to get a view of "who's using the bandwidth right now" on it ?

Not the process, not the remote host, not the monthly agreggate, but which connected device wifi or lan is using what, total or by host.

(use case; figuring out whose phone/laptop/tablet/tv/whatever is suddenly eating all the bandwidth in my home from time to time)

I'm using 18.06.05. A nice view in LuCI would be perfect but something that need to ssh is fine too.

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Simple answer: `opkg install luci-app-nlbwmon` and you get instant bandwidth stats in the LuCI web interface.

Otherwise there is documentation on all other possible tools you can use:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/network_monitor... https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/wwan/bandwit...

On openwrt I like small utils. As ssh is fine: having a look adhoc who is a bandwith hog, I check with iftop and press "t" to cycle to one-line-sent view and "s" to aggregate to the receiver see https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/network_monitor... - there's no key yet to toggle per item total amount, but this can be had by using "show-totals" in an .iftoprc file:

    line-display: one-line-sent
    hide-source: yes
    dns-resolution: yes
    show-totals: yes
    show-bars: yes
    use-bytes: yes
    sort: 10s

downside is: iftop as far as I know can't filter multiple interfaces, so you'd need to check them separately with -i eth0 / -i wlan0. If you're mainly concerned about latency, give the package "sqm-scripts" a try. You're sacrificing a bit of bandwith for active queue management. So a VoIP session is not affected by a download.

Thanks, that seems to be exactly what I wish !

Already using sqm (and I love it) but it's for use cases like when a laptop that hasn't been used in a while is started by someone to charge before watching a movie and steam/dropbox/windows on said laptop start hogging everything. In a residential area where we're still depending on ~10 Mbps adsl, identifying the device can be a need.

> downside is: iftop as far as I know can't filter multiple interfaces, so you'd need to check them separately with -i eth0 / -i wlan0.

Since I care only about lan <=> wan, doesn't that mean I just need to check on wan ? And all clients would be there, no matter if they're connected to the router through lan or by wifi ?

ntopng. It doesn't run on OpenWrt though. I have tried, but you have troubles compiling it and resource constraints depending on the device. Might be lucky if you have ARM and enough space.

But I have long searched for something similar. The answers were mostly useless e.g. most if not all were for the combined bandwidth.

I now run ntopng on another x86 device and use port mirroring to capture the traffic that goes through the OpenWrt device.

Sounds / looks like it's exactly it.

What kind of resource needs are we talking about here ? The router I use at home is a R6220 (OpenWrt description "It comes with a large 128 MB NAND ROM with space for many packages and a single core (dual thread) MIPS CPU powered by 128 MB RAM"), do you reckon there is a chance for it to run there ?

If you manage to compile it ... maybe. If you do, please post on how you did it.

bandwidthd did that job for me!

Does it have an instant view (or a way to refresh it at current data) ?

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