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Is Wireshark the correct tool as a data (traffic) meter? Something better?

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My household is allotted 250 gigabytes per month. Someone in my family is using-up all the data. The "traffic meter" on my router (WNDR3700) only tells me total data usage. I want to break it down by MAC address (or some other identifiable way). Is Wireshark the correct tool to do this or do i need something different? (Lubuntu compatible please.)

asked 13 Nov '14, 23:09

Shiny%20Toaster's gravatar image

Shiny Toaster
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accept rate: 0%


One Answer:

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You request sounds like you want to use Wireshark/tshark as a (real time, long term) network monitoring solution (monitoring 250 Gbyte of traffic for a month). That won't work, as neither Wireshark nor tshark have been developed with that goal in mind. There are well known problems (ever increasing memory usage and others), that will create problems if you run tshark/wireshark for a longer period of time (see other questions).

I suggest to install OpenWRT, DD-WRT or Gargoyle (or any other supported OS, like Tomato, etc.) on your WNDR3700 and then do some traffic accounting there, as those Linux Distributions offer far better tools than the standard Netgear firmware. Please ask in one of those forums how to do traffic accounting.

Regards
Kurt

answered 14 Nov '14, 02:04

Kurt%20Knochner's gravatar image

Kurt Knochner ♦
24.8k1039237
accept rate: 15%