All,
I’m currently in the process of examining the viability of hooking up a Frat house to a Canopy network. Currently, we have an Advantage 5.7 SM on that connects to a remote Advantage AP which backhauls through a 5.2 BH20. The AP has 3 other less demanding customers through the air.
I’ve been monitoring their connection in Prizm and I’m having a hard time understanding exactly what is going on at this site. They are reporting that they are losing connectivity at night around midnight. And I can partially see this happening; the data drops significantly during their peak period, but Prizm reports that there is still connectivity.
This Frat house has a lot of XBox Live users, gamers, and other high bandwidth users. I’m trying to figure out if the SM is being overloaded by the amount of packets they are trying to push through the line. Page 85 in the user guide states that an AP can deal with 1800 packets per second, and a backhaul can handle 3000 packets per second. Is there a way to view these stats on the SM and AP to see if this is the problem?
Their internal network could also be a problem, as they have 4 cheap linksys 16 port switches that are daisy chained together. So, basically, I’m trying to figure out if it is truly the SM or if it is their internal network before I make a recommendation for their service. This is the most demanding user we’ve ever had on our service and I’m just trying to figure out the viability of providing service to this customer.
Can anyone offer any suggestions?
Thanks for the help!
-Mike
You can use Monitoring software to remotely Monitor traffic, PPS, and signal.
Such as:
CACTI
MRTG
PRTG
I use Cacti myself as do many others on the forum. It works great for us.
Do you have a traffic shaper in place?
With so many users, 1 single P2P user can make everyone else unhappy. This frat house sounds like a commercial class customer, and hopefully they are paying accordingly (at least three times that of a residential customer) We have several customers that had us set up hotspots in their hotels, coffee houses etc. until we put in a traffic shaper, our network suffered, and everyone was unhappy. We now use Mikrotik Software on used computers to manage and prioritize traffic, specifically shutting down viruses and worms, limiting P2P traffic, setting limits per user for max connections, and giving equal speed queues to all users. You also get MRTG graphs setup automatically. It will be the best $40 you ever spent!
Frothingdog.ca,
I’ve been using the following monitoring applications: I’ve been using Cacti to monitor traffic across the backhaul and on the switch; I’ve been using Nagios to monitor overall uptime on each of the devices; I’ve been using Prizm to monitor the fine details of the SM and the AP. How have you been measuring PPS? I have not come across this in Prizm, but I may have missed it.
Also, do you have Cacti templates for an SM or an AP? If you do, that would be helpful.
YappaDappa,
We are charging them accordingly. I’ve been in the awkward position of trying to show them that it is not our service which is having the problem, that it is actually their internal network.
I have not deployed a traffic shaper at that site, but after reading your post, I’m going to give it a try. I found an open-source project called Master Shaper that just may do the trick. But in the meantime, I may take the hit and buy the Mikrotik software just to drop in a solution within the next few days.
-Mike
Ya I use the templates from the cactiusers forum. However I don’t think you need the templates to measure PPS. Just monitor Unicast packets on the ethernet and the wireless of the radios within Cacti.
Search this forum for a link to the Cacti templates.
cougmundah wrote: All,
I'm currently in the process of examining the viability of hooking up a Frat house to a Canopy network. Currently, we have an Advantage 5.7 SM on that connects to a remote Advantage AP which backhauls through a 5.2 BH20. The AP has 3 other less demanding customers through the air.
I've been monitoring their connection in Prizm and I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what is going on at this site. They are reporting that they are losing connectivity at night around midnight. And I can partially see this happening; the data drops significantly during their peak period, but Prizm reports that there is still connectivity.
This Frat house has a lot of XBox Live users, gamers, and other high bandwidth users. I'm trying to figure out if the SM is being overloaded by the amount of packets they are trying to push through the line. Page 85 in the user guide states that an AP can deal with 1800 packets per second, and a backhaul can handle 3000 packets per second. Is there a way to view these stats on the SM and AP to see if this is the problem?
Their internal network could also be a problem, as they have 4 cheap linksys 16 port switches that are daisy chained together. So, basically, I'm trying to figure out if it is truly the SM or if it is their internal network before I make a recommendation for their service. This is the most demanding user we've ever had on our service and I'm just trying to figure out the viability of providing service to this customer.
Can anyone offer any suggestions?
Thanks for the help!
-Mike
we had a similair situation where a customer reported that anytime they were playing online simulatniously on their 3 XBOX 360s and on the computer surfing that everything basically stopped. it boils down to this, most basic routers or switches werent meant to handle that much traffic. period. we told her she was overloading it and thas what the problem was, havnt heard anything since.
good points all.
Which again is why I love Mikrotik so much for these type of solutions. Throw a used system at it, say a celeron 2.4, slap in a level 4 router OS on a compact flash or Disk-on-module and BAM, you’ve got a more powerful router that most enterprise class systems. Believe me, we got rid of a Cisco firewall and 3000 class router in favor of the MT, and we got many times the performance PLUS antivirus, graphing, queuing, etc. It is SOOO scalable.
I know I sound like I work for them of something, but fact is, Motorola and Mikrotik make an awesome team. They both complement each others weaknesses, with the end result being a better managed and higher performing service for your customers.
I am glad this Client is paying for commercial service. We have made so many mistakes not billing or packaging services accurately when we first started… we are still regretting some of those arrangements today.
Let us know what you end up doing.