I'm about to take delivery of a new Apple Time Capsule, essentially a NAT Router and Wireless AP with GigE switching and 802.11 g/n concurrent capability on both 2.5ghz and 5ghz frequencies. What it doesn't have is QoS to prioritize my network traffic.

Here's what I have right now:

Cable Modem
Linksys WRT54GL NAT Router with Tomato firmware
Dell GigE managed switch
MediaTrix 2102 SIP (voip gateway thingy)
Other hard-wired and wireless computers and devices

The MediaTrix device has a lot of networking features built in, including the ability to connect directly to a modem and act as a router. Here's a link to its manual.

I want to start using the Time Capsule in place of my WRT54GL to support my wired and wireless LAN. I'd like to maintain priority on VOIP traffic so that other WAN usage doesn't degrade call quality or prevent incoming/outgoing calls. I'd like to also prevent high-bandwidth protocols/traffic such as bittorrent from degrading other network traffic such as mail SMTP, POP, HTTP, FTP, etc... Basically anything I might consider real-time as opposed to "background" as I consider bittorrent.

I don't mind picking up another another device such as the Hawker HBB1 "Internet Booster" which is an external QoS devices that connects between your modem and router.

I'm wondering if I can use either the Mediatrix or WRT54GL effectively between the Time Capsule and modem to traffic manage, leaving everything else up to the Time Capsule. And if so, how they should be configured. I'd like to maximize my network speed both on the WAN as well as on the LAN.

I took a brief look at the manual for the Mediatrix, and see it has some QoS signaling features, but I'm not sure if it handles the traffic shaping itself or if it only does priority labeling of the packets so they can be managed downstream (on the various routers, etc. on the internet pipes).

The Hawker device takes less power than the WRT54GL and should "just work" without configuration as far as I know.

I got the TIme Capsule about an hour ago and so far I'm finding some troubling details about its features. Or rather lack of features.

It's missing some pretty basic networking features, such as:

Can't set a specific local IP address for the router.
You can pick three IP ranges, but the address of the router is always xxx.xxx.1.1
Another "Router IP" address is always xx.xx.xx.1 based on the DHCP address assigned by the cable modem/ISP.

No way to assign static IP addresses to devices on the LAN. Solution for this found.
I've seen people mention in forums that either there's no good reason to use static addresses (frigtards all of them) or that you're supposed to set the IP address on the devices themselves (that's absolutely lame).

With regards to the last item above, setting up a static address on my notebook for example will cause the network connection to break if I ever take my machine somewhere else. That's because the TCP/IP settings are done on an interface level, not network level. Which means that a static setting will apply to all networks using the WiFi interface. To get around this I'd have to make a new interface profile and remember to switch to it MANUALLY every time I'm outside my home network.


UPDATED: PHEW! At least the Static address problem seems to be solved. Looks like the current Airport Admin software includes "DHCP Reservations" which is the UI for assigning static IP based on MAC.

I saw that UI element as I was flipping through tabs and made a mental note to check it out (as a possible static assignment) but then forgot about it as I was looking into the other features/issues.

The few times I've used the airport admin software I've never been too impressed. The hardware's not bad though.

In my experience, it could do everything I thought it should, but figuring out how was not obvious. (though of course I thought it should do QOS too, but I knew it didn't)

I think most of this stems from their attempt to present this technology to the masses, where other companies haven't spent much time at all on their UIs and had, at least in the past, based their terminology directly on what a network engineer might expect.

I've always gone with Linksys routers for the ability to use third-party firmware which has always been better presented and more fully-featured than Linksys' own. Tomato IMO has been the best of the lot, in part because of its simple, staraight-forward and well organized layout.

I hear you loud and clear on QoS. Especially when there are open solutions to QoS, you'd expect the feature to turn up in the product. I'm going to give it a shot with everything connected to the Airport though. Perhaps Apple are doing some automatic QoS under the hood that they just don't mention.

I won't hold my breath of course, because this would be a good marketing feature if it was in place.

Tacking on an additional series of questions to the original topic...

The AirPort Admin software has no UI for checking your network's bandwidth usage, but that facility is something I rather need because our cable internet has a fixed monthly cap. It has logging, but it's what you'd expect from a network log, with all kinds of port and connection data just dumped as text down a page.

Using the Tomato firmware on my Linksys router I have it logging bandwidth statistics to my always-on media server via CIFS. Tomato has a UI to display bandwidth usage in a number of different ways, including by month, daily, weekly, by connection, etc.

At minimum I need a way to track the usage by month. I don't really know anything about SNMP, but I do know the Airport products have a check-box to enable it (on by default). It can also save syslogs to a remote client.

Will this data be suitable for analysis and construction of the usage reports I need? I've found some SNMP monitoring and graphing software on the net such as PRTG Network Monitor and PRTG Router Traffic Grapher

They both look like a little overkill, but at least they're free. As long as they don't take up too much CPU while running, I don't have a problem installing them on my Windows-based media system.

If anyone can provide any more information about monitoring this network connection, I'm all ears. Including any suggestions for simpler applications that may suit my needs.

I just found Byte-o-Meter which looks a little less intimidating. Of course I still need to find out if these are gong to work at all.

How is it that your ISP can limit your monthly bandwidth, and not provide you a way to know if you have broken that limit?

The ISP apparently has some "customer management" section on their web page. But how to log into that is a mystery to me, even after contacting their support department. Apparently I need to use my email address and password to log into it. I suppose they expect that all their customers use one of their email addresses.

I have no idea if they assigned me an email address when I signed up for service and if they did what the password would be.

They also have a support system on their site that allow you to, among other things, to check your billing. I can log into that with any email address and only needed to provide my account number with them to get access to the details.

Why do they have two different ways to log into their site each with access to different information? Don't know. Just know I can't waste any more time trying to get the information from them.

Heh.. you could insert a Tomato/DD-WRT Linksys router between the Airport and the cable modem..



EDIT: with the added benefit that the VoIP could connect directly to the Linksys for improved QoS access.

It was one of my thoughts. I just need to know how to set up the Linksys in this situation. Ideally I'd maintain all NAT, etc. on the Apple router.

Would this be as simple as setting up the Apple Router as the DMZ on the Linksys?

I've just installed a small SNMP graphing program on my Mac notebook however I can't seem to get it to show any results. It says "no SNMP response"

It hit my firewall trying to access "LockBox.local" which is my Airport router, so I let it through. But still nothing. I set its prefs to the LAN IP of the router (which I can ping quite successfully) and nothing.

I thought I'd try this out first before going the route of figuring out a more full featured program to run on my Windows server.

Yeah, that should do it.

Pity it's a cable modem that you're connecting to. For xDSL, the SpeedTouch 780WL looks pretty amazing on paper for a CDN$120 gadget.

Cheers

I know it might be admitting defeat, but wouldn't this problem be solved for free already if you picked up the phone and called your ISP?

I've considered putting Tomato in front of a Airport, but at that point decided that I might as well stick with Tomato router. A ReadyNas works great with time machine if that's why you're set on the airport.

I've got a cheap N router that I've tagged on as an AP, and it's worked ok for the last few week but I can't get channel bonding to work.

Getting the Self Serve account thing figured out by my ISP will be something I do at some point, but I don't know how close to real-time its numbers are. I've also seen it in use before, prior to changing plans with them and thus moving to a different account. It only showed a single number. No details for monthly/weekly/daily which I'd really like to see.

With regards to the Router/AP... Yes, I want N, but I also want G, which the new Time Machine handles concurrently on two radios. I could, I suppose run the WRT54GL as a G AP through another N router or run an N AP connected to the WRT. The latter would lose the GigE routing capability I get with the Time Machine though. And the former means I couldn't run Tomato for QoS since it doesn't support any N routers.

The only reason I'd put a Tomato-running WRT54GL in front of the Airport is because I already have one. Otherwise I'd pick up that Hawking HBB1 dedicated-QoS box and use that instead.

I'd only use the WRT54GL for QoS (and perhaps the VOIP box as Mark suggested). I'd be turning off the wireless radio. I just need to confirm whether or not it will properly do QoS with something on its DMZ.

Mmm.. good question, and one that can be answered by setting it up and logging into the router (telnet, ssh) to verify the Linux routing/QoS setup afterward (most Linksys and other routers are Linux-based).

But even that should be unnecessary. QoS on Linux gets applied to the upstream link (or links on a bridge), not the downstream. And the DMZ is downstream. So if the VoIP ATA is plugged directly to to the Linksys unit, it should work as well as it ever will.

But that's another story. QoS is difficult/impossible to do perfectly when one has control over only one end of the link. Unless your ISP cooperates (rare/unlikely), then no product at your end can do a 100% perfect job.

The problem is the ISP downstream connection, which queues up packets on the ISP side. At your end, you cannot control that, and therefore cannot do full QoS on downstream packets. Upstream, yes, piece-o-cake.

What Linux solutions tend to do, is flow-control the downstream, trying to target a bandwidth that is 10-15% below peak connection capability. The reserve bandwidth leaves room for high-priority (VoIP) packets.

All of the Linksys / whatever equipment all do it that way.

EDIT: A possible exception is when the modem itself implements QoS (eg. SpeedTouch 780WL/voip). There's a way to do QoS at the ATM cell level, which only modems have access to. But whether it can do it or not (for downstream traffic) depends on the DSLAM (telco/cable) side of the connection.

Cheers

Well, there's no guarantee that the device supports SNMP. Try using "snmpwalk" from the command line:

snmpwalk -c public -v 1 hostname

"public" is the most common read-only "community string", and all devices that support SNMP should support version 1. You can try version 2c to check, though.

If it supports SNMP, you should get a crapload of output.

Personally, I use Cacti for this type of thing. Might be too user-unfriendly for what you're looking for, though.

I know for a fact it supports SNMP - it's in the Airport Utility. And it's apparently how the Airport Utility communicates with the base station.

The snmpwalk did in fact produce a crapload of output, including a list of all the devices using the base station's DHCP.

Last night I tried to install MRTG using MacPorts but I didn't get anywhere. It was taking hours to download all the bits and pieces needed to compile MRTG and it seems to just get stuck at some point on one piece without ever getting to the actual MRTG source. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a binary for Mac OS. Why do these guys assume everyone likes to compile this stuff? I can't be the only one who thinks having binaries for Mac OS, Win32, etc. would be useful, if not just convenient.

I'll try that Byte-o-Meter today. But this might all be moot if I use the WRT54GL as a QoS gateway with the VOIP box connected directly to it. In that case I'll use the WRT's bandwidth monitor because it will include all the voip traffic as well.

It's possible it supports v1 but not v2c, which can explain why the tool you mentioned might not be working. See if there are configuration options.

-v 2c with snmpwalk works fine as well. Lots of output.

I'm finally testing out these SNMP monitors. I'm sure PRTG will have all kinds of reporting features for a lot of folks, but its UI is really the pits. For real-time stats reporting (not simply generating a report output file to print) it lacks the ability to report based on month or week. Kind of critical if you ask me.

When you select the month view it will show you the current month broken down by day and you can scroll to the bottom to see the totals. When you pick year it still breaks it down by day. Ugh.

The UI for PRTG was just too much to get through. This is PRTG Grapher by the way. The Monitor wasn't useful at all since it seems to be only web-based and it never did do anything with my router.

Byte-o-Meter seems a lot more basic but gets the job done. Including immediately auto-detecting the router and the correct interface to monitor.

The problem however is that it's buggy as hell and just crashes all the time. Great.

Check out the "Free Applications" on this page. Again, I use Cacti (at work), but you might not like it.

My current solution is this...

Using the old WRT54GL as my NAT Router serving DHCP to the Time Capsule which is running in Bridge mode. LAN devices are all connected through the Time Capsule, wired and wireless. The radio on the WRT is turned off.

First benefit: QoS management - though I didn't notice any problems running congestive downloads and VOIP at the same time with TIme Capsule.

Secondary (but important benefit): I can use Tomato's very nice bandwidth logging which gets saved hourly to my TV server via CIFS.

As long as I'm using the WRT54GL in front of the Time Capsule, I can't think of any negatives to not using the TC's NAT. Or rather, I can think of no benefit to using double NAT.

If I ever find a stable piece of software that can monitor my bandwidth usage using SNMP then I may just give up the WRT. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a solution that works or doesn't involve installing Apache and all manner of other server software.

You don't want to do double NAT anyway.