Took a Break
Sorry I’ve not posted in a while, however, since the last
post I made pretty good progress on the “manual drive” portion of the creeper,
I can get it going forwards and backwards just by tilting my android phone
appropriately, reading the compass, choosing the correct heading, reading the
Bluetooth, etc.
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| 4 months now! |
In my last post, you saw we got a new puppy, she has been proving
to be a big handful and the cause of most of my break on the creeper, but at 4
months she is settling a bit and after the new year I’ll pick things back up
and continue coding it out. The good
news is, the PIXY performed nicely at school and the students are getting excited about working on it,
so we’ll be picking up steam on the creeper again! I've included a shot of the puppy here, purely for selfish reasons, I get more hits to my blog when I post pictures of Rue! :)
Networking (the internet kind)
In the meanwhile, I thought I would take some time during my
Christmas vacation to play around with some networking software at home. At work, I code/support a large installation
of custom made software to measure traffic on several very large networks. The code is built to be scaleable, to be
automatically configured, inventory all the networks regularly, and send all of
this data to support and billing systems.
I’m sometimes asked by folks “Why can’t you just use MRTG”. (instead of a custom built solution that they
don’t understand).
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher)
So, I thought I would gain a better understanding of MRTG by taking another look at it, on a smaller scale. First, MRTG is a great tool, built on PERL. I was able to install it on my
MacPro at home pretty easily using HomeBrew, a software distribution mechanism
for mac’s. I tried compiling all the
dependencies myself first, but that proved to be a pain as compiling code
usually turns out to be, so installing it from HomeBrew made it a 20 minute
thing, should have started with that first. I was up and running in no time. First though, I had to make sure my home wifi router supported SNMP, the network management protocol used to extract data
from routers. My RT-N56U router does
indeed support it if you install external storage on it, download the necessary and turn it on. I was able to research
all of this on Google and turn on SNMP!
To make a long story longer, MRTG is a great tool for a
contained network, one that you point MRTG at, it will go and begin collecting
and even make nice HTML files for you to look at. It is quick and easy. Why it isn’t good for my purpose is for
exactly the reasons outlined above, it doesn’t scale to where I need it to
be. Every live interface that it draws
data for, it creates several files. NOTE: I’m
not using a database or RRDTool in my application, some of these files won’t
exist down that path, but the data will live in a different kind of file
nonetheless).
Each interface gets 3 image files, a DAY, WEEK and MONTH PNG
image file. Also, each interface gets a
LOG file to contain the data collected, and an HTML file to present the
data. This is pretty cool on a small
scale. If you use the database and
RRDTool interface, the PNG’s won’t be created and the data in the LOG files
will be stored in RRD database files instead.
But, the data is still stored in database files. Also, if using RRDTool and an external database, the PNG drawings will be built when requested
to be seen, this should be fast based on this architecture, but again, I have 1
million or more interfaces to worry about, I don’t want individual
files/databases for them, I need things more accessible/scaleable/disaster
recoverable than that.
I really like MRTG, but for scale, my solution at work is
still the best choice for the business needs it serves, HOWEVER, for a quick
look at what is going on without much hassle, assuming you have all the right
access credentials you need, MRTG is a great tool to do just that (or even, for
smaller scale networks). It can
certainly be extended to fit your needs, it is open source after all, but you
may be in a cycle of continuous integration if you want to upgrade MRTG to the
latest and greatest and most up to datest to get some new feature it has.
Anyway, playing around with MRTG and looking at the data it
collects, I made some discoveries about my home entertainment characteristics I
didn’t know. Discoveries that are making
me rethink my setup.
My Home Entertainment Setup and the Network it Uses!
Roku
This Christmas, my daughter wanted a ROKU, so we bought her
one. Also, I kept getting kicked out of
Netflix due to an XBOX Live issue a couple of weeks back, it was so annoying
that I decided to buy a ROKU 3 as well. Needless
to say, I Love it! So much so that I
then went out and bought a ROKU Stick for my little tv in the den so I can
watch tv there too! Since I have all
this new tech AND the ability to measure how much network they use, I thought
it would be cool (geeky kind of cool, I know) to see just how much network to
validate my monitoring setup. Keeping in
mind that I use (or used to anyway) the XBOX for all of my entertainment needs,
Netflix, Windows Media Center Extender, Hulu Plus, VUDU, etc. Well…. Long story longer, here is what I
found.Roku vs XBOX 360
Running Netflix on my ROKU Stick (not even the ROKU 3),
running at 1080p, streaming “I, Frankenstein” draws about 400KBps (3.2Mbps). Running the SAME movie, during the SAME
section of the movie on the XBOX360 with Netfix draws about 40KBps
(0.32Mbps)! Really? XBOX Netflix streams 1/10 the bandwidth of
ROKU! The quality on the XBOX Netflix is
capped at 720p, so that is one contributing factor. Now I’ve never been totally happy with the
quality of Netflix on my 61” TV, I always saw color banding, but it wasn’t
horrible. Compared to the ROKU though,
the quality of the picture is drastic, and now I know why, Netflix must be
pretty compressed coming in through the XBOX versus streaming it on the
ROKU. It is such a drastic difference
that you cannot even see the usage on the chart at the scale it needs to be for
the ROKU streaming!
Some definitions before looking at this chart. I was able to identify the interfaces on my router and where they connect:
(LAN) - This is the wired network into my house served by the router (your wired computer hooks into this network)
(WAN) - This is the interface to the outside world, in my case, to Time Warner Cable roadrunner service
(5Ghz) - This is my second of Dual Band wifi, the 5Ghz band. Your iPhones, iPads and laptops will probably connect to this wifi band
(2.4Ghz) - This is the standard wifi band, this happens to be what my Roku's are connecting to.
Some definitions before looking at this chart. I was able to identify the interfaces on my router and where they connect:
(LAN) - This is the wired network into my house served by the router (your wired computer hooks into this network)
(WAN) - This is the interface to the outside world, in my case, to Time Warner Cable roadrunner service
(5Ghz) - This is my second of Dual Band wifi, the 5Ghz band. Your iPhones, iPads and laptops will probably connect to this wifi band
(2.4Ghz) - This is the standard wifi band, this happens to be what my Roku's are connecting to.
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| Showing network usage between WMC and ROKU, Netflix on ROKU and on XBOX360 (Click on pic to see full size) |
Other services - Summary
To be fair, I also compared the TWC streaming app (Cable
company streaming app) on ROKU versus the XBOX.
On my charts you’ll be able to see where I was streaming TWC via a
ROKU3 (right after Netflix, the arrow pointing down to nothing in the WAN graph), and once again, you cannot see the traffic that TWC app was pulling from
the internet while streaming on the XBOX, the traffic is so small. Again, the quality difference isn’t totally
noticeable unless you take the ROKU and put it on the same TV and compare side
by side. However, I like to have the
best quality sound and video in my entertainment room, so now I know I’m not
getting the best video out of my XBOX that I could have on the ROKU, so…. I’ll
be purchasing another ROKU for my streaming needs! The XBOX still excels at games and of course
it is now the ONLY game in town to be a Windows Media Center Extender,
functionality I also really like (people that come over really like it too).
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| Vudu at 1080p serving Ultra Violet |
At least now I know (and now so do you). Thanks for reading, hope this information is
helpful to someone!
