Reece Hart

I’m having lots of dropped connections at home. Unfortunately, consumer-grade routers typically have poor monitoring facilities out of the box. Unix/Linux environments have long been able to aggregate logging messages across multiple hosts through a service called syslog. Many routers use embedded Linux and support sending messages to remote systems via syslog. (Emailing logs is supported, but that’s a clumsy option.) This post is a short tip on how to configure a D-Link DI-825 (rev B1) to send system messages to an Ubuntu 10.0 host, but the general method will apply to many routers and nearly all Unix/Linux hosts are capable of acting as logging destinations.

First, you’ll need to configure your syslog destination to listen for messages. Ubuntu 10.10 uses rsyslog, which has a mercifully modular configuration mechanism. The configuration is:

whoville$ cat /etc/rsyslog.d/40-router.conf
$ModLoad imudp
$UDPServerRun 514</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">$ModLoad imtcp
$InputTCPServerRun 514</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">if $fromhost-ip startswith '192.168.0.' then /var/log/router.log

Restart rsyslog with something like sudo service rsyslog reload. Your machine is now listening for syslog events and you should see that /var/log/router.log was created.

Then, configure your router. The DI-825 configuration looks like this:

192.168.0.175 is the internal IP address of the syslog destination.

You should now be able to monitor your router, like this:

whoville$ sudo tail -f /var/log/router.log
Feb 12 20:34:26 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sendOffer : find a free IP
Feb 12 20:34:28 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sending OFFER of 192.168.0.104
Feb 12 20:34:28 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sendOffer : device_lan_ip=192.168.0.1 , device_lan_subnet_mask=255.255.255.0
Feb 12 20:34:28 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sendOffer : client is in lease/offered table
Feb 12 20:34:28 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sending OFFER of 192.168.0.104
Feb 12 20:34:29 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sending ACK to 192.168.0.104
Feb 12 20:35:03 192.168.0.1 udhcpd[782]: UDHCPD sending ACK to 192.168.0.104