Generating Alcatel Speedtouch graphs micro-howto <author>Koos van den Hout <koos@kzdoos.xs4all.nl>&nl; <date>$Date: 2005/12/21 09:04:00 $ <abstract> This document tries to describe how to generate graphs of the line-quality as measured by Alcatel "Speedtouch Home" ADSL modems. </abstract> <toc> <sect>Disclaimer 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. <sect>About this document People with Alcatel Speedtouch ADSL modems have probably at one time or another visited the pages <url name="SDSC's Self-Help Guide to the Alcatel Speed Touch Home ADSL modem." url="http://security.sdsc.edu/self-help/alcatel/"> 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, <url name="the FAQ" url="http://security.sdsc.edu/self-help/alcatel/faq.shtml"> keeps telling: <it>Q: How do I generate one of those nifty charts? A: That information will be forthcoming soon.</it> 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. <sect>Prerequisites <itemize> <item>An alcatel speedtouch modem. At this moment this works (for me) on a Speedtouch Home ethernetmodem with 3.2 firmware. I have tried other modems (such as the Speedtouch 546i) but could not get carrier data from them (they must have the carrier data in there somewhere to function, so I want to get that data!). <item>The 'expert mode password' for this modem. <item>Some operating system which supports Perl, sockets and gnuplot (tested with Linux, should work with Solaris, FreeBSD and others, might even work with Windows NT). Scheduled operation of scripts is also needed. <item>Perl 5. <item>The Perl module Net::Telnet (install from cpan). <item>A recent version of gnuplot. <item><url name="The scripts that come with this howto that can be downloaded" url="http://idefix.net/~koos/speedtouchgraph-scripts.tar.gz">. <item>A cooperative dslam in your exchange which will give you a statistics report. </itemize> If the 'cooperative dslam' is missing then you will miss the upstream part of the statistics. <sect>Fetching the status The script <tt>fetchst.pl</tt> 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. <sect1>Automating the fetching of the status It is a lot more interesting when this fetching happens automatically on regular intervals. Therefore the shell script <tt>alcatelprobe</tt> calls <tt>fetchst.pl</tt> 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: <tscreen><verb> */10 * * * * bin/alcatelprobe </verb></tscreen> <sect>Processing the logfiles to a plotdatafile and plotting the results 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 <tt>alcatel-day</tt> which first calls <tt>mklogs</tt>, a shell script which converts all .log files to one <tt>alcatel-day.dat</tt> file using the perl script <tt>eatalcatellog.pl</tt>. Then gnuplot is called using the <tt>plotscript</tt> as command file and the result is moved to the right directory with the right filename for the webserver. <sect1>Automating the processing and the plotting 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: <tscreen><verb> 51 23 * * * bin/alcatel-day </verb></tscreen> <sect>Displaying the results 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 <tt>http://www.example.com/alcatel-logs/?N=D</tt> The result will look like (depending ofcourse on your phone line and adsl subscription) this <url name="Sample graph of my phone line" url="http://idefix.net/~koos/pics/alcatel-graph.png">. <sect>Future improvements 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. <sect>Links <itemize> <item><url name="http://www.alcateldsl.com/" url="http://www.alcateldsl.com/"> <item><url name="http://www.sateh.com/hacks/crc.php" url="http://www.sateh.com/hacks/crc.php">. </itemize> </article>