Tomato Bandwidth Monitor with Windows 7

April 11th, 2010 | Posted by tonyscha in Technology

I use tomato on one of my routers at home. Its a hacked firmware for select linksys routers. So far it has treated me really well. I have my bandwidth monitor enabled, which keeps track of downloads/uploads in gigabytes. You can backup the logs. That is where I am running into issues.

When saving through cifs on Windows 7 (I am assuming Windows Vista is very similar), I had to do several special things to get it to work properly.

1) First issue I had, is mounting the cifs, you need to use the IP of the machine not the hostname. Since it does require the IP, I made my desktop machine ip static.

2) Now you have to share a directory to be able to save the files too. I have mine saved to a dropbox folder as an extra backup. When mounting the cifs you need a user account on the machine and it must have a password. Make sure that user has access to the shared folder. To share a folder you can just right click go to properties->sharing

3) Another issue I had was, the folder had to be in the root of the filesystem for it to work. I am unsure why, but just from looking on google about cifs and tomato that was a suggestion. Since I wanted my logs saved in a different location this didn’t work for me. So I found out if you make a simlink in the root of your harddrive to the directory where it will be saved it will work.

I created a simlik with the command below (With windows 7 you have to run the command as an administrator, right click on command prompt and so a run as).

C:\mklink /D C:\tomato “C:\Users\tonyscha\My Dropbox\tomato”

Now my tomato bandwidth logs are saved hourly!

Enjoy

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12 Responses

  • Jay Richard says:

    Thanks for the simlik command. I am running TomatoUSB (Teddybear) 1.28 on an Asus Rt-N16 under Windows Xp-SP3. I have successfuly gotten CIFS working, the drive mounted okay. The logs are not backing up on the schedule that I requested and it only backs up to a .gz file. When I extract the .gz, I have a file with no extension. I have tried .txt, .htm. .html. .xml and the file is not readable. What do I use to see this file.? It is only 2 kb in size or so. Also, actually all I want is backup of web usage for a particular IP on my network. Ideally I would also like to see the blocked addresses, too. Is there a script that I can use to make this happen? My previous (netgear) router just sent the logs to my e-mail.

  • tonyscha says:

    As far as I can tell the file inside of the .gz is a pure binary file, and is not human readable.

    As for the logging of a particular IP or blocked addresses, I recommend checking out http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=160 as a source, and ask the question there, as I am not a huge router/script person.

  • Philip says:

    What is simlik? Is that an .exe?

    Or I create a .bat file?

    I am lost past step #3.

    Thanks for helping.

  • tonyscha says:


    Philip:

    What is simlik? Is that an .exe?
    Or I create a .bat file?
    I am lost past step #3.
    Thanks for helping.

    Philip, run this command, just change the directories to what you want.

    C:\mklink /D C:\tomato “C:\Users\tonyscha\My Dropbox\tomato”

  • Philip says:

    Yes, I did it many hours ago. I have it save at 1 hr in Admin-Bandwith Monitoring. But it still not saving it.

    After running that command prompt in admin mode, it create a LINK on my c: drive.

    I use my desktop login n pwd and have that folder shared as I can see it too my network folder.

    What am I doing wrong?

  • Philip says:

    I got it working now.

    I have to do one thing:

    Right click the destination folder – Sharing tab – Advance Sharing – Permission button – Add button – Add the user (from above). I give it Full Control with Change and Read all tick.

    Go to your Bandwidth in Tomato. Click Daily – Configure – Hit SAVE and watch your Window directory and it get updated right away. I put in 1 hr for auto.

    I delete the LINK thing and it still work. I have my directory buried 2 folders in and it still work.

    Let me know if I am wrong.

  • Philip says:

    I find more interesting things when I move to another new router, but same model!

    Check this out on what I discover:

    1. I move my previous stats from old router to this new router.
    2. It would not save because you have to manually do your own FIRST save!
    3. Then go in configure your CIFS Client and Bandwidth monitor freq on this new router
    4. Now it will SAVE on the next one
    5. Not using symbolic link still work

    Let me know if I am drunk. Thanks!

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  • stuart says:

    Um – interesting
    im having trouble trying to mount a 4GB USB drive from my Linksys E2500/ ShibbyTomato router connected to Netcomm NB304N/std firmware modem router

    the usb can be seen via ftp address ok and it can be seen via MS Win7 but i cannot get Tomato to mount it .
    any thoughts

  • Anthony says:

    Stuart,

    I have never mounted a usb on a router, let alone a router with tomato. However I did find this – http://rockydog.homedns.org/index.php?page=Mount_Format_USB_Drive.html&Page_Name=Partition%20and%20Format%20a%20Optware%20Ready%20USB%20Drive%20for%20a%20TomatoUSB%20Router

    The support page is linux driven, but I think there is some useful info on how to setup the USB support.

    Hope thats helps.

  • Brendan says:

    What happens when the drive isn’t available? For instance, if the computer with the CIFS share is off for a few days.

    Will data be stored in RAM then saved to the CIFS location when it becomes available?

  • Anthony says:

    It will be stored in RAM, so if you turn off the router during that time frame, you would lose your data. On startup of the router, the CFIS location needs to be available to import the data. If its not available, whenever your CFIS share became available, it will load it then.



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