Beacon Real Time Traffic Monitor tx,rx rates

[wwalcher]

Aren't the tx rate and rx rate readings backwards on the Beacon Realtime Traffic Monitor? I have a lot more traffic coming in than going out, and on my WAN interface, it shows just the opposite. And when I do a speedtest, the tx rate goes up when I am doing an incoming test. Not a big deal, but I thought I would mention it.

[lonnie]

It is done from the perspective of the client. The main purpose was to watch client traffic at the AP and the numbers tell what they are doing. The client Tx is the AP Rx.

[eoinverling]

Hi,

I have a number of StarOS WRAP boards as AP around the place, and am having trouble with one of them .. just wondering if there's a changelog anywhere I can take a look through, it's running an older version that most of my other boards v2.01.1 (build 4590) ...

wondering if that's the problem, or me! :)

cheers
E

[eoinverling]

I see in the changelog the routing versions changed between these 2 versions, any known issues routing between a build 4590 and a build 4619

[lonnie]

No. Routing is pretty basic.

[georgew]

unfortunitly an experienced technician expects transmit to be sending out from the box he is logged into...

So this causes everyone that looks at it to troubleshoot the wrong thing.

I've gotten used to it, and I have to remember to tell people the meanings are opposite of what you expect.

I have not had a case where someone has felt this was correct. But then I use staros as a generic router, a cisco replacement... but even when I did use it as cpe, I found this annoying and confusing.

It is a pretty unusual logic to have a display that shows tx/rx from the point of view of some other box... that is anti-intuititive.

It took me a while to figure out it was reversed too, so it actually cost me a customer and several days of debugging time, and at least a couple months of wondering what was going on.

You have changed the meaning of tx and rx...that or you are wrong... The point of view argument doesn't hold water... not unless you provide a switch to allow us to specify "ap" or "cpe" so that we can make it correct from OUR point of view.

Has *anyone* found the reversed meanings helpful besides the programmers?

How many people have falsely accused the wrong end of a connection for misbehaving?

There is a reason this keeps coming up.

[tog]

Not to be inflammatory, but it's probably one of the main reasons I don't even bother using beacon and I just use trafshow on one of my FreeBSD routers instead.

I do not like the tx/rx reversal in beacon, it's really confusing. I tried for a minute or two to make filters that worked to drill down and look at only one client's traffic at an AP and I couldn't really get it to work right and display the traffic I wanted to see so I gave up and just used trafshow instead and haven't been back to try again.

[jeff]

Is iptraf going to make it into V3?

[lonnie]

No, there are no plans for it.

Is iptraf going to make it into V3?

[Steve]

That's too bad. It was very helpful to be able to see total thruput and pps.

[tony]

If you disable all display fields with Beacon, it will provide you with total throughput counts for that device.

[Steve]

Thanks! I didn't know that.

[kbldawg]

Are your referring to "Traffic Monitor" in V2? I hope not, I loved that utility.

No, there are no plans for it.

[lonnie]

You guys have to approach these tools more like kids and not little old ladies.

When you see a bunch of check boxes and data entry fields with names like source ip and source port, etc you really should see what happens when you check and uncheck some items and try some IP addresses to see what the heck they do. I am quite convinced you'll have no desire for any other tool once you learn how to use Beacon. We wrote it to everything we felt we needed to be able to see traffic that could be causing problems.

And, sorry, but I just have to throw this into the ring --> as a useful tool it should not matter what you think the labels should be. As long as you know what they are you should be able to make use of that tool. To ignore it because you happen to think rx should be called tx is, well......, I'll stop short of dinishing that sentence.

One of the things I first learned from my Dad is that a tool is useful if you have to learn how to use the tool. It never seemed to bother him that he had to at times compensate for his tools inadequacies because as he said - having the tool was way better than not having it.

We know from using other tools and building Beacon based on what was out there and what we needed we really feel it is way better to have it, and we use it daily.

Thanks! I didn't know that.

[tog]

To each his own.

It's not that big a deal, I just wouldn't mind seeing the whole tx/rx thing un-reversed.

[tony]

This is something we can look at adding support for.

[tkerns]

This is from a v2 point of view......

Traffic Monitor.... found it very useful in detecting network performance issues, not so much the tcp, but the lower part of the screen where there is a running display of udp, icmp, and gre. Using this display I have isolated ping floods, peer-to-peer floods, rouge linksys routers.

Detailed statics.... Has been very useful in determining performance issues, like when my provider has performance problems and not delivering promised bw. Also when I did not have a user cbq'd and could see they were using all of the available bw, this ties into using "lan station monitor" as well.

Lan station monitor... useful in determining performance issues when a client reports "access is slow", can run bw test and see what they are getting. Also useful in determining "bw hogs".

beacon monitor.... useful in isolating problems with a client and connectivity, like vpn's, a ham trying to do some kind of voip connection to other ham computers. I have not found beacon to be as effective tool to replace the other 3 above, the display is not continuous, fills the screen losing what you can not display, and the bw breakout of the others above.

my thoughts, I would like to see the others brought back, we all have different needs and use the tools differently. I do feel that monitoring is a step back in ver3, maybe I'll get use to it and find other ways to monitor and isolate, but for now I am still using a ver2 backhaul to assist is isolating ver3 issues.

Another tool that I would like to see is the client bw usage become easier to collect and use. maybe when snmp gets implemented this will happen.

Take these as suggestions and not criticism.....

[gregclemmons]

The TX RX reversal is a pain in the butt!
if i look at ether3 tx should be traffic out that port.
I have 2 v3 servers that one shows correctly the other shows reversed. Diffrent brand ether cards? could this be the issue?
also this causes SNMP to report incorrectly. and makes Source and Destination Reversed.


Gregclemmons

[tony]

In general, the beacon RX and TX are from the clients perspective, and is Ethernet independent.

This will not effect byte counts in SNMP however. If the byte counts are reversed, it could be caused by a buggy Ethernet driver.

[gregclemmons]

client prespective?

My main gripe is on my gateway servers pc x86 v3 3 nic cards no wireless machines.

where is client assumed to be?

on the unit beacon shows reversed snmp also shows reversed.

gregclemmons
netspeednow.com

[lonnie]

The client is assumed to be connected to the device their traffic enters your router.

[tony]

Lonnie is correct. Initially, beacon was designed to be used on the AP for tracking issues with specific clients. Since it is now more widely used in other areas, we will look into adding an option to disable the rx/tx traffic reversal in the display, which will make it easier to use.

[go.fast]

In the client information window.

"RX Data: 782273410 TX Data: 20286746955"

Is this bits or bytes?

[tony]

Bytes

[go.fast]

Bytes

so it's : 20,286,746,955 Bytes or 20.286 GigaBytes of download?

[tony]

18.89GB, that is correct. (counts are accumulated since last card reset / reboot, which clears the stats).

[go.fast]

18.89GB, that is correct. (counts are accumulated since last card reset / reboot, which clears the stats).

Hoiw did you get to 18.89
Whats the formula?

George

[tony]

Windows calculator, Going on the basis of 1024 bytes / KB.

I just found a web site that will help as well.

http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/band-calc.asp

Paste your number (20286746955) in the Bytes section, and hit Calculate. It'll show you how many GB (among other readings).

[go.fast]

1024 bytes

Thanks

[therealboss]

20286746955 / 1024 = 19811276.323242188
19811276.323242188 / 1024 = 19346.949534416
19346.949534416 / 1024 = 18.893505405

Bingo

[nickwhite]

If you're lazy, Google is always good for conversions of any type:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=20%2C286%2C746%2C955+Bytes+in+GB&btnG=Google+Search

-Nick