[ale] SDN in the home paper

[Alex Carver]

On 2019-05-30 04:07, James Sumners wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 03:54 Alex Carver via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 2019-05-29 05:39, James Sumners via Ale wrote:
>>> I'm trying to research alternatives to Ubiquiti's UniFi product line
>>> because they don't currently support bandwidth usage history recording,
>> and
>>> don't seem to be adding it in any sort of hurry, and came across this
>> paper
>>> --
>> https://www.cogentoa.com/article/10.1080/23311916.2018.1469949/references
>>> . It's a survey of some 40+ articles that are looking into how Software
>>> Defined Networking (which is what the UniFi line really is) can be used
>> in
>>> the home. I'm about 10 pages into this paper and am noticing a disturbing
>>> theme I thought you guys would be interested in: the surveyed papers seem
>>> to lean toward shunting off the controller to the ISP. Want to enable QoS
>>> for streaming video and VoIP? No problem. Just let the ISP inspect your
>>> traffic and provide you with new tiers of service priced accordingly.
>>>
>>> This is not the rabbit hole I was hoping to find.
>>>
>>
>>
>> The bandwidth and usage data is available if you run the Unifi
>> Controller software and bind the AP to it.  It gives you data on a
>> per-client and per-AP basis.
> 
> 
> Not what I’m looking for. I need month to month history on the WAN
> interface.

Sorry I was confused.  UniFi is their wireless stuff while EdgeRouter is
their gateway stuff (with the exception of the Security Gateway).  I
thought you were asking about APs not a router.


However, the UniFi SG does have a hackish way to observe the WAN traffic
https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Routing-Switching/Monitor-monthly-WAN-bandwidth/td-p/2391834

That would require you to probably screen scrape it with a cron job to
keep tabs on it.

The EdgeRouters can do this as they will report interface statistics via
SNMP.  So you could have something like MRTG running elsewhere
collecting the data.

The EdgeRouters can also have extra software installed on them so it's
also possible to do it more directly but with a bit of hacking.
https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeRouter/My-bandwidth-monitoring-solution/td-p/1255655/page/3

https://www.firewallhardware.it/en/ntopng-passive-and-active-monitoring-of-network-traffic/


The EdgeRouters also support NetFlow so you can use that as a monitor as
well.
https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008732414-UNMS-v1-NetFlow
https://www.nathanhunstad.com/blog/2016/09/edgeos-and-netflow/