Sky Spy

Perl scripts for monitoring network status on Sky Broadband routers.

Work in progress

This is still a work in progress and a little rough around the edges. Documentation is lacking.

download.pl is not yet ready for mainstream use.

Rationale

You would use Sky Spy if:

you have issues with your Sky Broadband connection, and would like to diagnose the problem, or gather evidence to present to tech support.
you would like to keep an eye on your network for some other reason.

It’s worth noting that, to get a really accurate log of what’s going on, the machine running Sky Spy should be left on 24/7. If you aren’t happy with that, you probably need look elsewhere.

Installing

I’ve tried to make these scripts as simple to install with as few hard requirements as possible, and am testing them with the default Mac-OS-Snow-Leopard-installed Perl 5.10.0.

###With a user that’s always logged in This is the easiest way to go, if you’re either uncomfortable with Unix terminals and so forth, or are perfectly happy leaving your machine logged in 24/7. I have no experience of how this works with things like Mac OS X’s fast user switching.

Save the status.pl and download.pl scripts somewhere in your home directory. I use ~/bin (or, in common terms, a directory called bin directly in my home directory) because I’m a nerd.
Open Terminal.app (in /Applications/Utilities/) and type crontab and hit return.

You’re now editing your crontab (cron table) file in vi. This file allows you to specify how often to execute specific commands (see Wikipedia for more info on cron). The format is:

mins hours day-of-month month day-of-week command

So if, like me, you’ve put status.pl in ~/bin and want it to run every 5 minutes, saving its output to ~/logs/network_status.csv (that file should exist), you might add a line like:

*/5 * * * * ~/bin/status.pl >> ~/logs/network_status.csv

To add that line, enter A (note the capital) and paste that line (or your own variant) into the Terminal window. Make sure that the line is terminated with a newline character.
To save, press escape and type :wq and hit return.

###Without a logged-in user

TODO

Output

###status.pl Each line of output offers the following fields, comma-separated and in the following order:

start-time of logging
end-time of logging

Connection state (Up, down, etc.)
Connection protocol (PPPoA, etc.)
Authentication mode
Connection time
External IP address

Downstream speed
Upstream speed

Downstream attenuation
Upstream attenuation
Downstream noise (in dB)
Upstream noise (in dB)

###download.pl