ASUS RT-N66U how to identify source of traffic spike

Question

I have an ASUS RT-N66U as my home router. We are experiencing some traffic spikes in downloading over WiFi that slow all other activity to a crawl.

Is there a way to identify the source (ip/host) of the traffic spike from the router's web interface?

My next step would be to disconnect that host.

I'm fairly noob in this area - any help appreciated, thanks! :)

Answer 1

Contrary to a widespread myth, saturating one’s bandwidth with a big download or upload should NEVER cause a latency spike for everything else. If it does, you’re probably hitting a widespread and well known router bug called bufferbloat.

Use http://dslreports.com/speedtest (note: this is NOT Ookla speedtest.net) to get your bufferbloat grade. If you get a bad grade, look into enabling FQ-CoDel (or any later smart queueing algorithms to come from the bufferbloat research community) on your router. You may need to install open source firmware such as OpenWrt on your router in order to enable FQ-CoDel. Enabling Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is helpful as well. Also consider adjusting traffic shaping on your router to make your CoDel router a slight bottleneck so that FQ-CoDel can kick in before bloated buffer queues build up anywhere else.

Or look at purchasing a turn-key solution such as EvenRoute’s IQrouter.

Answer 2

I am not 100% sure, but do not think the stock Firmware will give you this level of detail. but you could install DD-WRT.

[edit added below] To Install DD-WRT on this device you have to be very very carefull... there is a REAL chance of briking it! but the detailed instructions for how to install (depending on what version you have) are posted here [end edit]

and then you can use a script like for example this one

basically once on dd-wrt, you need to run this:

wget http://wrtbwmon.googlecode.com/files/wrtbwmon -O /jffs/wrtbwmon

and

chmod +x /jffs/wrtbwmon

But if you are a noob like you say, this might be a tad difficult, but nothing that can not be done with some research, and trial and error.

Answer 3

I wouldn't run DD-WRT I would Shibby's version of TomatoUSB. It is more stable that DD-WRT and more user friendly for a beginner. You can get it from here http://tomato.groov.pl/download/K26RT-N/build5x-121-EN/Asus%20RT-N66u%2064k. Then you should be able to follow the steps that @user1201232 gave if you want MAC address filtering. Or you could just set up monitoring on your LAN which can be filtered by IP/hostname.

Answer 4

Graehamf, if you are still looking for a WRT build for RT-N66U, check out the 'merlin' asus-wrt builds at http://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/

I have it running on my RT-N66U. I downloaded the wrtbwmon script to /jffs and ran that script manually with the different commands from https://code.google.com/p/wrtbwmon/wiki/Deploying and it throws some errors but it still seems to track and report usage. Looks like it uses iptables under the covers to collect statistics.

Update

Since Google Code has since gone away, I forked a copy of wrtbwmon to github and made some changes for it to work better on my Asus WRT router. One limitation is that if hardware acceleration is enabled on the router, bandwidth statistics might not be all inclusive.

https://github.com/dgonyier/wrtbwmon

The script creates a HTML page with a table that is visible at yourrouterip/user/usage.htm after it has had some time to gather data.

Answer 5

With your current firmware you can't, log in that device shows only basic information but you should check this information and tips.

Signal Strength.

You must to be sure you have enough signal and constant, with less signal you will experience spikes in your current wireless conection.

Channel Interference.

You must to be sure you are the only(in the best case) one access point in your current channel or you will experience spikes for channel overlapping.

Environmental Interference.

You must to be sure you are not so close to electrical interference becais it made noise in your wireless signal and you will experience spikes

Wireless Configuration.

In some cases the problem belongs to networking devices, you should check if router is working fine if is in good enviroment conditions without overheating and if the configuration provide the enough performance as speed or channel.

Security.

You must to be sure your access point is not being attacked by an outsider trying to crack your password to avoid that or at last to improve your secutity you mus to check this steps

1. Be sure you wireless network is have security enabled with WPA2-PSK AES
2. you should set a password with aleatory alphanumeric/caps characters not based in dictionary words
3. you could hide your SSID.
4. you could made MAC address filter.
5. disable the feature who allow the router to have access from WAN.

Bandwidth Usage and Wan Bandwidth.

Is possible your current network is shared with ppl who use a lot of bandwidth in Video Streaming, Audio Streaming, Downloads, Torrents.....etc so you should see if your current contract with the ISP cover all your needs.

Alternative Firmware.

In the way to improve your current firmware you could check alternative ones who provide you better features but be carefull, that haves a risk and in your case the risk is a little more, because you said you are a beginner.