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Forum Discussion
RBR40 and RBS40 wifi - Wishing to capture/monitor traffic/BW usage of connected wifi devices
Hello
Have had this model RBR40 RBS40 of Orbi for some time and am very happy with its performance once I installed two corresponding satellite units. I am keen to capture the usage of each wifi...
Oh, fudge. Also neglected to verify that RBR40 actually has a USB port. Looks like it does not. My bad. Sorry.
Hello
Thanks for the helpful advice FURRYe38,@CrimpOn and ekhalil. The VDSL modem is a Huawei HG659b. You were correct. I can see the individual IP devices in the IP table for the VDSL modem. I had read commentary here that NAT was enabled on the AP mode and had taken that as correct and not looked closely enough at the IP address listings of the Huawei. On your advice I have since attempted to test out the functionality of the WAN to LAN Port1 mirroring by clicking the setting under "ipaddress/debug.htm". I also tried the capture file setting to RAM since this hardware version does not support a USB socket. The capture file appeared all fine (I confess I got lost looking at the data not being a network specialist) . It did not seem to show individual IP addresses. I have also set up a windows tablet running Wireshark (and incidently Microsoft Message Analyser) connected (and monitoring ) Port1 of the LAN ports of the Orbi. (Now this was a challenge also: I am guessing that Port1 is the port that is closest to the external Internet port of the Orbi - am I correct here?).
Both tools seem to capture all traffic except WiFi Apple devices such as my iphone or Ipad. Have I missed something obvious? is there a layer 2 or layer 3 issue here. Am I looking at the wrong layer?
As an another test I have also placed a DD-WRT based switch between the VDSL modem and the Orbi to show what the LAN DD-WRT status looks like. This display was equally uninformative.Showning very little activity. Presumably I will need to enable TCPdump but i just thought it was going to be a simple solution to capture the individual device traffic...Appreciate some indulgence if you have some time to comment further. Chris
My Orbi is in router mode, as I sense a large number of community members have theirs. The debug file contains logs of "WAN" traffic and of "LAN" traffic. Since my Orbi is indeed doing NAT on everything leaving the Orbi, the WAN Wireshark file does not identify any packets by their private address space. The LAN file does do so. My guess is for Orbi's in AP mode, the WAN file will show the private IP's assigned by the Huawei and the public IP's that they are communicating with.
MY Orbi's LAN capture also has packets internal to the private IP space the Orbi has created. ARP requests, DHCP's, tons of broadcast packets, etc. I have no idea how the WAN and LAN captures differ for Orbi's in AP mode.
Just a wild hunch, but I am not confident that capturing packets is going to provide the data you want. I am not a pro with Wireshark or other packet analysis software, but my impression is that you might be able to "count packets", but may not be able to count "bandwidth." Millions of pings, for example, do not consume as much bandwidth as streaming a single video.
Sorry not to be more help.