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For a few days now I’ve been working (a few minutes at a time) on writing a post about how to monitor your bandwidth usage using munin by directly querying your cable-modem. Today however, when I checked my nice munin graph I found it had stopped working at about 8AM. Some further diagnostic procedures revealed that the cable modem was no longer responding to SNMP requests.
After a bit of googling I discovered the reason for this is that my ISP, Virgin Media, have deliberately disabled SNMP access. Reports vary on the reasons for this, some claim “performance” others “security”, but both are utterly bogus reasons. All this does is deny customers basic information about their connection like bandwidth usage, and I can only conclude that Virgin Media want to make it more difficult for people to dispute their figures.
This isn’t enough to make me ditch VM, but it has pissed me off, and the next time I move house VM are going to be waaay down the list of providers I’ll look at.
PS. My router doesn’t support SNMP either so I can’t use that.
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New blog post: Virgin Media are petty scumbags http://tinyurl.com/cux9fp
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Most ISPs do this – I’ve not come across an ADSL ISP that doesn’t support SNMP either – had to get my own router…
At least you can get cable!
There is a difference between an ISP supplying equipment that doesn’t support SNMP and one that gives you the kit but then disables the function. The former is being cheap, which is completely understandable, it is a business after all. The latter is just mean.