Before I start, let me say that we are SO BLESSED to have any type of high speed internet here at the hospital, essentially in the jungle. I am aware that so many that came before us to this place had to drive to town (more than an hour) to make a phone call or later to send an email as little as four years ago in this place. Today, we watch Youtube videos and check Facebook 20 times a day and then when it is slow, we complain. We are so very thankful for the connectivity that we have, but that said, we also want to be the best stewards of the connectivity that we have and we do often have very high demand for bandwidth.
We currently have a 1,000Kbps (1Mbps) connection which comes to us via point to point wireless at 2.4Ghz over about 28 miles or so. Right now, if I ping google.com I get response times between 70-115 mili-seconds. It is pretty common for me to get response times in the 30 msec when usage is low and I usually get times over 100 msec when usage is higher. There are around 50 people here that share the connection. Admittedly, we don't all use the internet, but I'd say that there must be 30 or more laptops here and it would be very likely that 20 of us are using the internet on any given evening. Additionally, during the day, we are using the internet for online classes for some of our home-school students (sometimes three at a time) and doctors are doing medical research (and checking their Facebook) and we have this IT guy
Here, finally, is the reason for my post: how do I know at any given moment, what our total bandwidth usage is on our internet link? What software/hardware can I use to give me a right now snapshot of our bandwidth usage? Additionally, If I could subdivide it out by router IP address (each house is on a router with a fixed ip so that I know who is what and where) that would just be perfect.
Extra credit: can I do bandwidth shaping such that I never allow one downstream router more than say half of the bandwidth of the connection so that one house (router) can't dominate the connection?
Some details. The connection comes in to the hosptial via 2.4Ghz connection and is then ported into our SonicWALL TZ170. We then redistribute that connection out to the campus. We distribute it directly to the hospital users (they are connected directly to the SonicWALL via cable or wireless) and we also send it out to the houses via 802.11b to a receiving router (Linksys WRT54G) running DD-WRT firmware. When I look at our usage history (past, not present) - I can see usage by router and know that a particular house used x amount of bandwidth yesterday, but it doesn't give me a good sense of how that might have been choking the system at a particular given point in time.
Please leave any questions or comments in the comments sections of this post and thank you for your help!
DF
Once again, I have little information. Would having a router with QoS help any? It may not tell you how much you are using, but it might let you change the amount of bandwidth available to each ip or service. Random thoughts at 0530.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=219560
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ReplyDeleteThank you Aaron. QoS won't really help us here (it will make the Voip calls a little smoother - but generally they are very good here). Both of those links look good. I will research them further. We use dd-wrt here, so the second one might really come in handy. Thanks! DF
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