Questions about WAN-Port, Switch and Monitoring

Hi all,

i've now after two tries set up my TP-Link as Access Point.
WAN-Port is currently not in use, the primary router is connected via LAN on Port 1 of Switch
All works fine, but i have some questions:

  • Is it possible to configure and use the WAN port as part of the switch?

I've set up traffic monitoring using rrdtool (statistics).
my work computer is connected via WLAN. Whenever i start my Cisco VPN client which is required for connecting to my company's network, the graphs are quiet. After stopping VPN client and going back to native access, the graphs are filled again

And second question on this topic:
Beside the work computer my personal NAS is also connected via LAN cable on Switch Port 3.
I've uploaded from my personal computer connected to the primary router. Looking on the OpenWRT device, it's also not counting traffic. Could it be that the switch cannot be monitored with the default configuration?

Thanks in advance

The way that most home routers are designed, traffic that flows through the switch is never "seen" by any of the SoC's interfaces, so is not reported in those interface statistics. Many switches have internal packet/byte counters that can be viewed with swconfig from the command line. (In some cases, this has been disabled for performance reasons.)

As typically configured, the wireless interfaces are bridged to a SoC interface, then to the hardware switch. I don't know enough about Linux kernel internals to know if a bridged packet increments the counters of the interfaces involved. If they don't increment the counters under Linux, that may be what you're seeing. I agree it is puzzling that the "encapsulated" traffic is not counted, but the un-encapsulated traffic is seen.