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Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Huawei E620 USB Modem & vnStat

I have invested in a new USB mobile broadband modem from Three, a Huawei E620. I have been using it quite steadily for a couple of weeks I am quite impressed with it. The device was super easy to set-up, all I had to do was plug it in and select my service provider, it was then ready to use with my CrunchBang/Ubuntu Intrepid system. As well as being impressed with the ease of set-up, I am also impressed with its connection quality; the connection has rarely dropped and the device has maintained an average speed of about 1MB. If anyone out there is looking to buy a mobile modem for use with Ubuntu Linux, I can recommend the E620.

My only concern with using my new device is that I want to be able to keep track of the amount of bandwidth I am using; I have a monthly contract with an allowance of 15GB per month and I would prefer it if I did not incur any additional fees for exceeding my allowance. The shop assistant who dealt with me seemed to think 15GB was ample, I am not so sure. I have never previously had to worry about such things as I have always had unlimited access, but I believe I could quite easily burn through 15GB. So, I have decided to keep a log of my bandwidth usage. I am using vnStat to achieve this, a handy console based application for recording bandwidth usage for any given network device. vnStat is fairly straightforward to use and I have written some usage notes on my wiki for future reference.

Tagged with: hardware, linux, ubuntu

10 Responses to “Huawei E620 USB Modem & vnStat”

  1. Stas wrote, Saturday, January 17th, 2009

    Hey Philip, great post about great tools. I must say that I heard about vnStat from your post for the first time, and I'm looking to use it in networks I'm managing. I'm also already using darkstat. Darkstat is cool because it has it's own embedded webserver. But looking at vnStati, I think I can use darkhttp (http://dmr.ath.cx/net/darkhttpd/) together with vnStati to get the same results ;)

    Thanks for writing about these. Cheers.

  2. Philip wrote, Saturday, January 17th, 2009

    @Stas: Thank you for the information about darkhttp, I will check it out! :)

  3. Randy wrote, Saturday, January 17th, 2009

    Check out the PHP frontend to vnStat at http://www.sqweek.com/sqweek/index.php?p=1

  4. Philip wrote, Saturday, January 17th, 2009

    @Randy: Thanks for the link, it looks really handy. I may have to start publishing my bandwidth usage! :D

  5. Oli wrote, Saturday, January 17th, 2009

    I use vnStat, some simple maths to find out a percentage and Conky's graph widget to let me know how much I'm using in a given month of our limit.

  6. Andrea Chiavazza wrote, Sunday, January 18th, 2009

    I also am using a UK Three mobile broadband on an Huawei E169 with Ubuntu. But I check my usage at https://my3.three.co.uk/myaccount/ Where do you get the password from? It is contained in a welcome message that is sent to you via a SMS message!! You can read it with the software provided on a Windows system. Since I didn't have a Windows system at hand I managed to get hold of the message sending some AT commands to the modem stick! After you get the message you still have to decode it from some strange character encoding and you are done. A web search engine will be your best friend. Good luck!

  7. Philip wrote, Sunday, January 18th, 2009

    @Andrea Chiavazza: Thank you for the information. I do not have any Windows systems either, so I guess I will be Googling for a solution to finding my password. Having said that, there is really no rush, vnStat is doing a fine job at the moment. :)

  8. Petar wrote, Sunday, January 18th, 2009

    There's also bandwidthd, which is kind of ugly, but it does the job.

    Have you found a way to start these monitoring programs automatically after the connection is established?

    You can probably send and receive sms messages with Vodafone's ConnectCard driver, which has a built in metering, but is far less elegant than using just network manager.

  9. Philip wrote, Sunday, January 18th, 2009

    @Petar: I could be wrong, but I believe vnStat monitors the /proc filesystem and stores its own logs. It does not need to be run as a daemon. Having said that, it could be called on a regular basis via cron.

  10. achristoffersen wrote, Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

    Hi Thx for this post. I may be out of line writing this on you personal blog, but I would really like to know how to enable the built in 3g device in the new acer 10.1. I cant get it to work.

    cheers

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