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Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 1:49 pm
by agrohe21
I have kids that I want to track data usage and this works great. but the next question after noticing they used 500MB over the last 60 minutes is what were they doing? I cannot seem to find that information in the GUI and/or in the files on the Filesystem. If it is tracked in the files and we need to process them (Awk/sed/grep, etc..) that is fine also.

Can we track and aggregate website usage (hits, mb, etc..) similar to how to can set quotas. This can be per IP or setup DHCP to link one persons devices to an IP range and see quoata usage per that range.

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 6:35 pm
by Lantis
The web usage page lists some websites visited by devices.
We don't track number of visits (it just gets pushed to the top of the list each time), or bandwidth on that website.

You may be able to glean some information from the Connection tracking page, but that is not persistent.

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 1:44 pm
by agrohe21
Is that a Gargoyle limitation or OpenWRT?

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 4:39 pm
by Lantis
Gargoyle, but Openwrt doesn't do it at all so...

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 6:25 pm
by agrohe21
Fair enough. I thought I saw some plugins that did that like bwmon, collectd, etc... But I did not check in detail.

Is there any way to do this with enhanced logging and parsing? Or is this just not possible/reasonable?

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:04 pm
by Lantis
You could possibly parse the output of

Code: Select all

cat /proc/webmon_recent_domains
on a routine.

Gargoyle actually inspects every single packet and finds out what web address was visited.
OpenWrt can only do this by logging DNS requests. I'm sure that capability exists somewhere, but i don't know what it is called.
I also wouldn't call it as robust as what Gargoyle does, but they're both sketchy at best.

If you want absolute view of this, you need to run a transparent proxy.

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2020 9:28 am
by agrohe21
I assume that Gargoyle cannot be that proxy and I need some other software in between the wl
an and gargoyle, correct?

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2020 4:37 pm
by Lantis
You can install squid on Gargoyle, but there is no GUI for it (unless it comes with its own management interface).
Unless you have a fast device, the proxy won't be able to keep up with most internet connections these days.

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2020 5:55 pm
by agrohe21
I have a 300Mbs Xfinity package and I just got a WRT32X. I was running gargoyle on an ARcher c7 v2 but it maxed at ~100Mbs.

I also disabled wifi and use Orbi for my AP.

so considering that, not sure about squid. will try it out.

thx for the tip. you guys are always super helpful. Appreciate it

Re: Tracking website usage similar to data quotas

Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 11:54 pm
by agrohe21
when trying to install squid, I get a failed dependency for libstdcpp. how do I resolve that dep?

root@Gargoyle:~# opkg install squid
ERROR: Dependency libstdcpp of package squid cannot be found, try updating your package lists