Eircom DSL Stats

dglancy

I look at my stats at least one a week. At the end of the month I usually have about 250Mb of upload and 2.5GB - 3GB download.

Last week (the 2nd week of the monthe) I had about 120MB upload and 1.3GB download.

However, I looked at the stats yesterday and I now have 5GB UPLOAD and 6.5 GB Download.

There is no way I've used that much banwidth in one week. Also, 5gb of upload looks very strange to me indeed seeing as most of my upload would be HTTP GET/POST traffic and I don't play games or ftp upload any files.

On ringing eircom, they really werent any help and just told me to look for spyware on my computer (I use mac os x) and that the stats arent used for billing cause they are inacurate. When I asked what the acurate system said about my usage I was told that they cant query it!

Has anybody had any trouble like mine with the stats.

Here is a question. If someone was pinging my DSL router (its on all the time) then wouldnt my upload be very high? I really dont think anybody is pinging my router however! why would they. If something was pinging my router (say eircom network equipment) would I be liable for the traffic seeing as i know nothing about it?

What do you think?

thanks, D.

jd

Originally posted by dglancy
On ringing eircom, they really werent any help and just told me to look for spyware on my computer (I use mac os x) and that the stats arent used for billing cause they are inacurate. When I asked what the acurate system said about my usage I was told that they cant query it!

Already has been a few threads about this..
send a pm to webtest01 and he will look into it.
Online stats aren't a priority until contention on backhaul becomes an issue, ie until eircom consider charging for usage over the allowance.
Raw logs are radius tickets-they have to be parsed and processed-this would take quite a while on an adhoc basis.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/search.php?s=&action=finduser&userid=18529

Frank Grimes

Originally posted by jd
Already has been a few threads about this..

On this board? No way!
Anyway, take a look here dglancy.

seamus

Here is a question. If someone was pinging my DSL router (its on all the time) then wouldnt my upload be very high?

Not really. The maximum ping payload from a Windows machine is 65KB. Not sure of UNIX machines, but it wouldn't be much more.
Many machines won't even respond to pings above certain size thresholds.

However, I looked at the stats yesterday and I now have 5GB UPLOAD and 6.5 GB Download.

There is no way I've used that much banwidth in one week. Also, 5gb of upload looks very strange to me indeed seeing as most of my upload would be HTTP GET/POST traffic and I don't play games or ftp upload any files.

Those stats sounds like cumulative to me tbh, ie they don't reset them once a month. Besides, they don't bill you for your upload.

When I asked what the acurate system said about my usage I was told that they cant query it!

Which is a good sign. Means that if they can't accurately gauge your usage, they can't bill you. They could be lying of course.

webtest01

An important upgrade to the radius server broke the stats processing a couple of weeks ago. The stats should be up to date and correct now. Please check and let me know if this is not the case!

I've re-written some of the processing scripts to try to ensure that this kind of thing is spotted and corrected sooner. The upgrade to the radius servers should make the stats pretty reliable from here on in.

I've been pre-occupied with the indigo mail server upgrades, so this work has been stuck on the back burner. Hopefully I'll have a some time to make sure it's working properly today or tomorrow.

R

narnar2000

Same thing happened me - my stats said 700 MB d/l, then a couple of days later they went to (and stayed at) 4.1 GB. I did d/l about 1-1.5 GB in that time - but nothing like 3.4.....

This all happened in the last week, btw

webtest01

A couple of people have highlighted that their stats are still incorrect, and they are. So I'll explain why.

Radius tickets are generated by the broadband access servers (BAS), and these tickets are used to generate the online stats that you view. A radius ticket is sent at the start of a new session, the end of a session, and every few hours during the session.

Now, raidius was designed many years ago for dial-up connections and the people who designed it decided that 32 bits was plenty to store the number of bytes that you uploaded and downloaded. Sure, what are the chances that you could keep a dial-up connection up for long enough to upload or download 4GB anyway.

For those unfamilar with binary, 32bits can accomodate a decimal number between

0 and 2 to the 32nd power
or 0 and 4,294,967,295

Which make 4GB = 4,294,967,296 bytes

Then DSL comes along. BAS makers realise that it doesn't take very long to download 4GB on a DSL line, so they added 64 bit integers for uploaded and downloaded bytes to the radius tickets they generate. (They still include the old 32 bit uploaded and downloaded bytes for backward compatibility)

The problem is that most almost all radius servers do not understand the 64 bit integers and just ignore them. Like ours did until we upgraded it.

So up until recently, everytime you uploaded or downloaded more than 4GB in a session, the counter that was counting your upload and downloads reset itself to zero and started counting again.

So, to deal with this, anytime we saw a later radius ticket for the same session with a smaller value for bytes uploaded or downloaded than the previous one, we assumed the counter rolled over, and added in the 4GB.

(now people might realize that when their stats were wrong, their uploaded or downloaded always seemed to be out by some multiple of 4GB Sometimes the datafiles would get out of sequence if their was a problem processing the raw tickets, resulting in the occasional 4Gb being added to a session.

Now, during this month, the 64 bit problem with the radius servers was solved. So now the radius tickets contain the total number of bytes that you downloaded since the beginning of the session (even if the session started six months ago)

So, if you had a long running session (like days, weeks or months) suddenly your radius tickets for that session now contain the true amount that you downloaded since the beginning of the session, and not what they contained previously, which was the remainder of your total downloaded bytes divided by 4GB or

total_bytes % 2^^32

for you programming geeks out there

The stats for October have a mix of old and new radius tickets for long running sessions that have over 4GB of upload or download, because the upgrade happened during the month.

So basically, if you have a long running session that crossed into this month, in which you downloaded or uploaded more than 4GB, your stats for October are most likely incorrect.

I can correct these cases manually, but you'll have to email me your username to webtest01@eircom.net, so I know which ones to correct.

As all the stats for November will be of the 64bit variety, these kinds of problems should stop. I hope they will anyway.

R