Comments on: Graph your Airport Express / Extreme data throughput and more.

By: Robin Friedrich

Robin Friedrich — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:22:26 +0000

Is there a way to plot the aggregate usage for a period of time rather than data rate? Want to monitor total data usage through this WAN Comcast channel.

By: Joseph Forte

Joseph Forte — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:41:09 +0000

oops. Just got back to where I originally posted (the how to)
Now if I could only get THAT to work.

By: Joseph Forte

Joseph Forte — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:38:58 +0000

I cannot seem to get the installation confirmed by typing MR and tab to see if it autocompletes. When I type mrtg or cfgmaker it says command not found. when I type mr and tab, it actually autocompletes the directory “mrtg-2.9.4-mosx”. The directory mrtg-2.9.4-mosx/bin contains cfgmaker indexmaker mrtg and rateup executables. the mrtg-2.9.4-mosx is located in /Users/joe40/

Please help. Your post is great and seems like something I’d like to pursue, but I am stuck.

By: Joshua Ochs

Joshua Ochs — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:32:24 +0000

Quick followup on my comment. AU1 is the WAN interface of the Airport; there doesn’t seem to be a way to get data on the LAN or wireless ports on the older Airport. Also, it was monitoring properly - it just took a while for there to be enough data to graph.

Thanks again for the extremely helpful post!

By: Joshua Ochs

Joshua Ochs — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 06:04:39 +0000

Excellent post! I’ve been wanting to monitor my inbound and outbound traffic on the Airport for some time, and this should do the trick. A couple of comments:
- The MRTG installation above has an install script that places it in /usr/local/mrtg, which will not be in your default path. I edited this before installing to use the standard “/usr/local”.
- If your Airport Name has a space, substitute a dash (”-”). For instance, if your Airport Base Station is unimaginatively named “Airport Base Station”, you’ll need to use “Airport-Base-Station.local” in the instructions above.
- For pre-N base stations, you’ll need to use your base station password, as using “public” doesn’t get any useful data, and yo can’t set the SNMP string using the Airport Utility. Unfortunately, this means you’ll have to embed your password in the mrtg.cfg file.
- I’m on Leopard and received no errors regarding Unicode, so I removed “env LANG=C”.

I did a few things differently. As I mentioned above, I used the standard /usr/local install path. I also placed the mrtg config file in /usr/local/etc, which is convenient if you’re going to run it as a daemon with no one logged in. As a result, I fire it up with /usr/local/bin/mrtg /usr/local/etc/mrtg.cfg. Finally, I placed the MRTG output in /Library/WebServer/Documents/MRTG, so it’s published on my main web site.

Now for the problem - it doesn’t seem to get getting any real data, or even all of the interfaces. The only interesting interface I have (non-loopback or mirror) is au1, which appears to be either my wireless interface. That interface isn’t showing any traffic - which is just plain wrong. So something isn’t right, probably in my cfg file. Any chance I could get a little friendly help on this?