Hi,
I need to setup a router for a small hostel with 52 beds. A lot of the residents have more than one wifi device, so the router must be capable of handling 50-100 clients. The current router just doesnt let anyone connect to the wifi if there are too many clients connected already.
One important feature is traffic monitoring, since the hostel has only a certain amount of traffic available every month the owners must be able to watch how much is being used. It would be great if one could see how much traffic each client used to identify who is downloading stuff (which is not allowed in the hostel, but people still do it!).
I understand you can do that if you create quotas, but since the people in the hostel change every time, it would be impossible to create quotas for all of them.
I could create a quota for 5gb a day and if that is used limit the bandwidth. But I would still like to be able to identify who is breaking the rules.
Are those things possible with gargoyle?
Greetings, Kim
Router for a hostel
Moderator: Moderators
Re: Router for a hostel
You seem pretty aware of the issues. The more control you try and take the more administrative hassels you are going to have to endure.
You can use the quotas feature to accomplish what you want but you obviously need to add MAC addresses from each user which as you say would be a hassel.
There is no way with any router that you could make the connection between what you consider an improper download and the user making that download unless you do something like the above.
If you just want to limit individuals from using too much of your download budget without getting into what they are downloading here are some low hassle ideas.
Use the quote system of gargyole and set a quote on daily download of every IP address. This would largely effective but not totally effective. Some savey user would know how to switch IP addresses and avoid the quota but most would not.
In the next release of Gargoyle we will introduce conneciton byte matching in QoS. What this could mean for you is that if a user starts a download his bandwidth could be limited when he reaches a certian number of megabytes. Because his download is progressing rather slowly he will not be able to burn some much of your monthy data budget and he might get bored and decide to do something else rather than download porn, This approach does not require any user management but it does not strickly prevent people from breaking your rules either.
The other approach is a hotspot. I use hotspotsystems.com which I can recommend. They have their own firmware or you can use DD-WRT or if you are good learn about covachilli and configure your own using OpenWRT/Gargoyle. In this idea you have a lot of flexibiliy. For example you could charge everyone for access by the megabyte downloaded. The system collects credit card payments and doles out user IDs. You could also give out free tokens at checkin which provides a limited budget of download bytes. If the budget is exceeded they put in their credit card and buy more.
As to router performance I would think this would mostly have to do with the speed of your WAN connection and not so much the number of users but I am not sure on this point. Others might chime in and recommend a high performance router that can run Gargoyle.
Lots to think about.
You can use the quotas feature to accomplish what you want but you obviously need to add MAC addresses from each user which as you say would be a hassel.
There is no way with any router that you could make the connection between what you consider an improper download and the user making that download unless you do something like the above.
If you just want to limit individuals from using too much of your download budget without getting into what they are downloading here are some low hassle ideas.
Use the quote system of gargyole and set a quote on daily download of every IP address. This would largely effective but not totally effective. Some savey user would know how to switch IP addresses and avoid the quota but most would not.
In the next release of Gargoyle we will introduce conneciton byte matching in QoS. What this could mean for you is that if a user starts a download his bandwidth could be limited when he reaches a certian number of megabytes. Because his download is progressing rather slowly he will not be able to burn some much of your monthy data budget and he might get bored and decide to do something else rather than download porn, This approach does not require any user management but it does not strickly prevent people from breaking your rules either.
The other approach is a hotspot. I use hotspotsystems.com which I can recommend. They have their own firmware or you can use DD-WRT or if you are good learn about covachilli and configure your own using OpenWRT/Gargoyle. In this idea you have a lot of flexibiliy. For example you could charge everyone for access by the megabyte downloaded. The system collects credit card payments and doles out user IDs. You could also give out free tokens at checkin which provides a limited budget of download bytes. If the budget is exceeded they put in their credit card and buy more.
As to router performance I would think this would mostly have to do with the speed of your WAN connection and not so much the number of users but I am not sure on this point. Others might chime in and recommend a high performance router that can run Gargoyle.
Lots to think about.
Linksys WRT1900ACv2
Netgear WNDR3700v2
TP Link 1043ND v3
TP-Link TL-WDR3600 v1
Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH2
WRT54G-TM
Netgear WNDR3700v2
TP Link 1043ND v3
TP-Link TL-WDR3600 v1
Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH2
WRT54G-TM
Re: Router for a hostel
Thank you for the quick reply, unfortunately you are right, the more I try to control it, the more of a hassel it is.
The perfect solution would be to limit the bandwidth if a total of more than 5gb of traffic is used on a day for everyone, which is possible with gargoyle. But I would need a way to see who is using all the traffic. If I could identify the person downloading lots of stuff easily, I could just block that persons mac address or kick him/her out of the hostel for breaking the rules. I wish viewing how much traffic each client has been using by mac address would be possible.
The perfect solution would be to limit the bandwidth if a total of more than 5gb of traffic is used on a day for everyone, which is possible with gargoyle. But I would need a way to see who is using all the traffic. If I could identify the person downloading lots of stuff easily, I could just block that persons mac address or kick him/her out of the hostel for breaking the rules. I wish viewing how much traffic each client has been using by mac address would be possible.
Re: Router for a hostel
You can see who is using the bandwidth by IP, and then look in the connected hosts to match the IP to a mac address.
There is a good, technical reason you can't specify quotas or monitor bandwidth by MAC address. It's not just that I'm ignoring this feature request. The problem is that iptables, which does all the heavy lifting in the bandwidth monitor and quota system, only knows the source MAC of a packet, not the destination MAC address. This only gets computed as the packet leaves the router. So, it would be possible to monitor outbound bandwidth by MAC, but it's impossible to monitor total or inbound bandwidth by MAC address. The best you can do is set a static IP for a given MAC, or look up the MAC currently associated with that IP.
Your biggest problem, though, is the sheer number of users you have. That's going to eat up a lot of resources -- I suppose if you got an alix box it could probably handle that kind of load, but a WRT54GL is going to choke for sure. Also, if they're connecting wirelessly (instead of through a switch connected to the ethernet ports -- switches are pretty cheap, you might want to look into this), the wireless connectivity will slow down dramatically as you add more users.
There is a good, technical reason you can't specify quotas or monitor bandwidth by MAC address. It's not just that I'm ignoring this feature request. The problem is that iptables, which does all the heavy lifting in the bandwidth monitor and quota system, only knows the source MAC of a packet, not the destination MAC address. This only gets computed as the packet leaves the router. So, it would be possible to monitor outbound bandwidth by MAC, but it's impossible to monitor total or inbound bandwidth by MAC address. The best you can do is set a static IP for a given MAC, or look up the MAC currently associated with that IP.
Your biggest problem, though, is the sheer number of users you have. That's going to eat up a lot of resources -- I suppose if you got an alix box it could probably handle that kind of load, but a WRT54GL is going to choke for sure. Also, if they're connecting wirelessly (instead of through a switch connected to the ethernet ports -- switches are pretty cheap, you might want to look into this), the wireless connectivity will slow down dramatically as you add more users.
Re: Router for a hostel
Dir-825 is an atheros ar71xx device. They aren't supported (yet).
If you're feeling adventurous you can try compiling the latest version from the source in the git repository, which now has very experimental support.
If you're feeling adventurous you can try compiling the latest version from the source in the git repository, which now has very experimental support.