Given clashes I have seen with Alcatel about publishing data about Alcatel modems I need to add a disclaimer.
This document is written as an independent article. I am not in any way connected to Alcatel other then as a user of an Alcatel Speedtouch modem. Doing things as published here may already be something Alcatel does not approve of.
People with Alcatel Speedtouch ADSL modems have probably at one time or another visited the pages SDSC's Self-Help Guide to the Alcatel Speed Touch Home ADSL modem. and wondered how to make those carrier graphs mentioned there themselves. Those carrier graphs can be helpful in determining causes of line problems and getting your phone company to repair your phoneline instead of making you install the drivers again. Unfortunately, the FAQ keeps telling: Q: How do I generate one of those nifty charts? A: That information will be forthcoming soon. so I decided to find out for myself.
This document is written for an audience which understands enough of Unix to be able to write scripts and make things run from the crontab regularly and be able to install extra software if needed. All the scripts and software described here might be available on a Microsoft Windows platform too but as I have no experience with so I can't describe that.
Additions/improvements to this document are welcome at the above e-mail address.
If the 'cooperative dslam' is missing then you will miss the upstream part of the statistics.
The script fetchst.pl fetches the status from the modem. It simply
does this by logging in over a telnet session, giving the right commands
in a 'expect this string, send that' manner and logging the results to a
logfile for later processing. The quality data for each carrier is logged
(and some extra data like the maximum bitrate, but the scripts don't do
anything with that data at the moment). For each of the 256 ADSL carriers,
the modem measures and keeps the SNR (signal/noise ratio) in cooperation
with the dslam.
It is a lot more interesting when this fetching happens automatically on
regular intervals. Therefore the shell script alcatelprobe calls
fetchst.pl and then renames the result to a filename depending
on the part of the day. The easiest way to use this is to call it every
10 minutes (depending on how much data you want per day) from crontab. I
have a crontab entry like:
*/10 * * * * bin/alcatelprobe
The next step is to take the results of the last 24 hours and converting
those to a datafile that gnuplot can convert into a graph. This is done
by the script alcatel-day which first calls mklogs, a
shell script which converts all .log files to one alcatel-day.dat
file using the perl script eatalcatellog.pl. Then gnuplot is
called using the plotscript as command file and the result is
moved to the right directory with the right filename for the webserver.
After the last interval before midnight (in 10 minute intervals that is at 23:51) the processing can happen. To automate this create a crontab entry like:
51 23 * * * bin/alcatel-day
The easiest way to display the results is to have the directory-indexing
module of your webserver do the sorting. In Apache, an overview with
descending filenames (latest first) can be created using an url
like http://www.example.com/alcatel-logs/?N=D
The result will look like (depending ofcourse on your phone line and adsl subscription) this Sample graph of my phone line.
In the future it would be nice to be able to create graphs for other brands of (A)DSL modems. Then this would be a more general howto then just for the Alcatel. But I don't have one of those modems, so I need help from others to do that.
