Best Practices - I need to monitor bandwidth per IP or mac

georgeberz

Best Practices - father of 6 4) still in the house and I need to monitor bandwidth per IP or mac. Im not a geek Im trying to lock down our internet to provide a safer browsing experience in the house and liked pfsense I have it force filtering all DNS req to opendns and limiting browsing with that.

Is there a easy way to track daily/weekly/monthly all the data a specific ip or mac address are using?

Ive seen bandwidthd tossed around but heard that it got pulled. any other ideas for a NOVICE at this?

Thank you

George

chrcoluk

I think bandwidthd is the answer, is a shame as that seems to leave a gaping hole in pfsense.

bbrendon

In a corporate environment the "proper" tool for this is probably netflow, but that isn't easy.
Here is a summary of options https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/How_can_I_monitor_bandwidth_usage

scottiewater1973

it looks like a complicated piece of kit

marvosa

Probably looking at installing softflowd and exporting to a netflow collector.
You could grab a managed switch that supports netflow and export directly from the switch
You could install a product like Untangle in bridge mode leverage the web filter and bandwidth control apps along with many other features.

Best Practices - father of 6 4) still in the house and I need to monitor bandwidth per IP or mac.

Do a fresh and full install, install Squid and SquidGuard, SARG pfBlocker and perhaps Snort!
Create user accounts in Squid with MAC and IP addresses. Install also Radius Server using certificates on the wireless
or mobile devices from your family.

Im not a geek Im trying to lock down our internet to provide a safer browsing experience in the house and liked pfsense I have it force filtering all DNS req to opendns and limiting browsing with that.

Got to OpenDNS and create an account matching your family members.

Is there a easy way to track daily/weekly/monthly all the data a specific ip or mac address are using?

If you are using squid and user accounts you will see for each family member and each of their devices logs that can
be watched with SARG, and pending on the OpenDNS service they would be only see things matching to their ages.

Ive seen bandwidthd tossed around but heard that it got pulled. any other ideas for a NOVICE at this?

What you want to do really? Watch what all family members were doing or handling their bandwidth?
You could try out to;

set up a small Mikrotik router behind the pfSense and work it out with queue regulation to handle the bandwidth
you may also be able to set up a small Layer3 Switch likes the Cisco SG300-10 and work it out with QoS