After much waffling about whether I should or not, I finally installed the WRT54G flash OS upgrade. The thing that really sold me on it was that one of the features is that if it doesn’t detect any connections in n seconds, it will reboot. This will, hopefully, permanently solve the problem where it just goes offlline periodically.

Another wonderful new feature with the upgrade is that there’s useful data from SNMP, and I can actually get per-interface bandwidth utilization stats. This required a little poking around with mrtg to get the configuration right, and I discovered (yeah, I should have already known this) that you can generate a full configuration by just doing:

cfgmaker communityname@hostname

So, with roughly 20 seconds worth of work, I had stats on every interface on the device.

The nice thing about rediscovering this is that now, for every device at work that supports SNMP, we can generate graphs of bandwidth usage with almost no time investment at all.

Yes, I know, I should be using Cacti. Everybody tells me that. You don’t need to. I just already have MRTG installed, and I haven’t had the tuits to look into Cacti. So you don’t need to respond with “you should really be using Cacti.”

But I know you will anyway.

Smart alecs.