I recently moved house, and since then my internets have been… flaky, at best. Ringing their customer service (yes, Virgin Media, you) is masochism at its purest, and I was repeatedly told that it was fine, no problems at all. (You do get to choose the hold music though!).
I decided to get some stats, and see how bad it really was. A quick bit of duckduckgo-ing revealed a few options: PingPlotter & MRTG, for example. But I went with SmokePing in the end.
Installation is as easy as:
sudo apt-get install smokeping
Which installs both the daemon that gathers the stats, and a website to look at pretty graphs. I found this handy dandy article about configuration, although a few things have changed in the latest version.
The config files can be found in /etc/smokeping/config.d. I updated the Targets file, and added a few hosts:
menu = Top title = Network Latency Grapher remark = Welcome to the SmokePing website of 'Graham\'s laptop. F*ck Virgin Media.\' + Local menu = Local title = Local Network ++ LocalMachine menu = Local Machine title = This host host = localhost + UK menu = UK title = UK ++ BBC menu = BBC title = BBC host = www.bbc.co.uk ++ Google menu = Google title = Google host = www.google.co.uk + DotCom menu = DotCom title = DotCom ++ Google menu = Google title = Google host = www.google.com ++ Virgin menu = Virgin title = Virgin host = www.virginmedia.com
And bounced the daemon. Then it’s just a matter of going to: http://localhost/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi, and waiting for the graphs to fill out a bit.
The bad news? All those spikes. Apparently it’s a “high utilisation” problem, and won’t be fixed for a while :(
