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@mapache@hachyderm.ioThis month, my home internet data consumption has skyrocketed, but we haven't changed our habits or added devices.
Any tips on monitoring tools to figure this out? I'm curious if a pi-hole would help with that.
@mapache Pi-hole *might* help, but only if 1) whatever it is is making a lot of unusual DNS requests and 2) it respects the DNS server addresses handed out by your DHCP server (many devices don’t). You’d be better looking at the monitoring capabilities of your router, if it has them.
@mapache We were troubleshooting a problem like this and figured out that the ISP had started including the data going to the TV set top box, even though this was supposed to be "free".
We diagnosed this using their web site's display of the day's usage.
@mapache pihole could help but I think it’s hard to know which services have activated if you don’t have any baseline. Most likely you would need some router/fw to show the actual traffic amounts per service.
I have an asus router where I can enable traffic monitoring if I want to see traffic amounts per service per device. I haven’t enabled it as I don’t trust Asus not to sell the data.
@mapache disconnecting devices until one drops the load.
The culprit was a laptop that was continually trying to send a giant email attachment to a server that kept rejecting it.
@mapache you might have a dodgey application (think free VPN service type thing) installed somewhere. They will often route other people's traffic through your connection and that's how they provide "free" VPN exit nodes.
@mapache
When something similar happened in my home the pihole showed that one of the smartphones was doing a lot of requests from 1 am to 5, when everyone was sleeping. Some form of ad-watching malware.
@mapache
I remember doing this years ago just for fun. After flashing the router with dd-wrt, there was another bit of software called YAMon by Al Caughey that presented all sorts of data tables and graphs.
But I seem to remember the author became too busy to maintain it. The GitHub repo hasn't had any new code in 5 years.
@mapache
Can you log on to your internet modem / router / thingy?
You might be lucky and it has built in traffic graphing or logging that can tell you what devices on your network are the top talkers.
Otherwise check to see if it has any options to turn on SNMP.
If it does (and depending on how technical you want to get - you were talking about pi-hole, after all) you can fire up one of the many Open Source Network Monitoring Systems (NMS) and get it to talk to your router and give you the fancy graphs / detailed logs.
? @mapache check if your router can do this. Most ASUS routers have tools for this built in.
I often recommend zeek.org as a generic tool to investigate. It can be used by inserting a switch with mirror port and the gather all the data.
I prefer the JSON output and often use Elasticsearch after, sorry for the big cannon, all of this can run om a single relatively small PC