Welcome to Fritz Speed’s documentation!¶

Prerequisites¶

Fritz Speed is working on a standard Python 2.7 environment and relies on the following packages for querying the Fritz!Box.

• fritzconnection
• lxml
• requests

For storing the data in a round robin database it uses the python bindings to RRDtool.

• python-rrdtool

To get the scripts you need Git to clone the repository using the URL https://github.com/westfeld/fritz-speed.git

Installation on a RaspberryPi Running Raspian¶

1. Downloading the Scripts¶

To install the Fritz Speed scripts clone the GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/westfeld/fritz-speed.git

2. Installing the Dependencies¶

There are many ways to install the dependencies but for the common packages we rely on aptitude:

aptitude install python-rrdtool python-requests python-lxml python-pip

The fritzconnection package is not in the raspbian repository so it will be installed using pip by running:

pip install fritzconnection

3. Configuration¶

Configuration basically means setting the location of the round robin archive (rra) file in which the data is stored. In addition the properties and location of the individual graphs have to be defined.

Starting from the default fritz-speed.ini file typically only two variables have to be edited: rra_filename which defines the round robin archive filename in which the traffic data is stored and graph_basedir which is the output directory under which all graph files will be stored.

An example of a typical fritz-speed.ini file is shown here:

[DEFAULT]
rra_filename: /var/rrdtool/wan_traffic.rra
graph_height: 300
graph_width: 500
graph_basedir: /var/www/htdocs/pics

# definitions of graphs to be plotted
# each section corresponds to one graph
[day]
# interval in seconds to be plotted
interval: 86400
# title of plot
title: Traffic of last day
# filename of plot
filename: %(graph_basedir)s/traffic_1d.png

[week]
# interval in seconds to be plotted
interval: 604800
# title of plot
title: Traffic of last week
# filename of plot
filename: %(graph_basedir)s/traffic_1w.png

[month]
# interval in seconds to be plotted
interval: 2592000
# title of plot
title: Traffic of last month
# filename of plot
filename: %(graph_basedir)s/traffic_1m.png

4. Create Round Robin Archive¶

To create the empty archive simply run the following script:

./create-rra.py

During this setup step the maximum up- and downlink speed is queried from the router and set as the maximum valid value in the archive (an error margin of 10% is added to the determined value). This setting is important because if the router’s transferred bytes counter is reset this would otherwise lead to a spike in the traffic graph.

5. Running as a Cronjob¶

To monitor the traffic on the Fritz!Box the monitor-traffic.py script is executed periodically, which then reads the traffic counter on the router and stores the value in the round robin archive.

To generate the graphs from the stored data the script graph-traffic.py is executed. It would also update already existing images.

Typically one would add the following line to the user’s crontab to record the data and update the graphs every minute. To do so the command crontab -e opens the user’s crontab and the following line is added

*/1 * * * * [absolute path to script]/monitor-traffic.py && [absolute path to script]/graph-traffic.py

The MIT License (MIT)¶

Copyright (c) 2016 Thomas Westfeld

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.