This weeks pick of the week is iEyeNet.  iEyeNet is a widget that allows you to see the network interface utilization on any SNMP-capable device.  Why would you want this?  Simply put, it allows you to see what your Internet bandwidth utilization is at a glance.

If you have DD-WRT, this will work with with very little effort.  All you need to do, is go into the “Services” and enable SNMP.  The default settings will work just fine, but you may want to change the community strings to something only you know for a little bit extra security.

Once you have SNMP enabled on your router, install iEyeNet and configure it as seen below.  If your router is also your gateway IP address, it should enter that for you.  If not, set the Router/Gateway address to the IP of your router.  Set the SNMP community string to the string you set (or public by default), and then set the interface to monitor to vlan1, which corresponds to the WAN interface of most DD-WRT installs.  It may be slightly different depending on the model you’re using (I’m using a WRT54g).  If you can’t figure it out from looking at your router configuration, go ahead and try the each of the interfaces until you find the one that appears to match your Internet traffic usage.

Lastly, if your upload and download lines are reversed, you can just check “Flip Up/Down” to correct it.

That’s it for this week’s Mac App of the Week.  Be sure to check back next Saturday for the next pick!

I’m tired of trying to do a million things with DD-WRT, and feel that 100Mbps on the WAN link may not be fast enough soon with DOCSIS 3.0.  So I’ve come up with two options:

1. Create a small router/firewall with an embedded board, like a Soekris kit and end up with something like this:
   
2. Create a beastly VMware server using more commodity hardware and virtualize my router (my switch supports VLAN tagging).

What would you do?