Node 0 In a Home is Pointless

I've created my home network in an ad-hoc manor. Anytime I had a requirement I'd add to the network as opposed to nicely planning something and laying it in.

My first "node" on my network was connecting two PC's about 15 years ago. One in the main house, the other in the bedroom so I should share out the internet. That resulted in me purchasing a 15m cross over cable and connecting the two. Worked perfectly for a number of years.

Roll around 2001 and I got my first ADSL connection. The blue Alcatel frog!



This worked fine on my network but it was frustrating that the main computer had to me on to use the internet in the bedroom. Enter my first ADSL router.

From there more devices, more switches has lead to quite a messy network that works perfectly.

PRTG - Sweet Network Monitoring/Free Bandwidth Monitor

In this blog I plan to have some mustings about my weekend tinkering with my home network. Todady's post is on PTRG.

So I spent the whole day trying to setup a decent bandwidth monitor on my router. Years ago I used to use Tomato which had a great little tool built in but upgrades in internet connectivity meant that the WAN to LAN throughput of my old Buffalo Tomato router didn't cut it. Mean while I had also added a second backup ADSL line to my primary Cable line.

I tried googling SNMP bandwidth monitor and a few tools came up. But all were cumbersome to setup, required too much tweaking and installing pearl.

Enter PRTG. It just automatically scans your network for any SNMP capable devices so my Draytek was discovered. It instantly listed all my interfaces and I could now see live bandwidth reports and plot historical ones too.

Brilliant tool to complement any SNMP router for the home!