I never had a really clean way to visualize my home/home office network usage before. I had a very complex network with multiple sub-nets, dual routers, etc.
But as I explained last week, I reconfigured my network. One of the advantages is that now all of my data – both home and home office all goes through one router (even though I have two cable modems on different networks).
This allows me to see the total data we’re moving around here.
So here is a picture from the last few days usage:
You can click the image to make it larger.
Monday was a heavy lifting day on some rather large databases I needed to share. And I was downloading some “free” music (really – not stealing it!) via BitTorrent.
But I like seeing how much data I am eating. I’m sure it is more than the average Time Warner cable modem customer – after all, I have 14 PCs and 26 “Internet Enabled” devices here! In any case, it makes me feel better about the money I spend for my cable modems!
I can also see a daily graph of my data usage:
That huge spike in traffic at about 10 am shows when my son woke up, and started playing World of Warcraft (he has several level 90 characters – which I guess is maxed out). Whatever. Traffic drops off sharply at 5 as my kids go do whatever teenagers do. And I took a nap 🙂
I can also use QoS (Quality of Service) settings to shape my network – to give some data types a higher priority than others. I haven’t adjusted anything related to QoS yet – but it still shows me a pretty graph. I plan on giving priority to email, browsing, and IM clients. Then a lesser priority to my kid’s games, and a lower level to BitTorrent, Microsoft Update, etc.
So I am happy so far with the new setup. It hasn’t needed any tweaking since I turned it on, and I haven’t had to reboot anything lately!
As I learn more about the software, I’ll share more. The logging appears to be excellent, for example. But I haven’t had a lot of time to dig into it.
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