Nested quotas

[JeffinTx]

Can quotas be nested? E.g., I'm trying to set my router up so that users get 1gb per day before slowing down, but max 25gb per month before shutdown.

[ericwong]

I don't see how to configure what you asked.

You could configure a per IP address setting plus router wide setting. e.g. 1GB per user along with 25GB per month for the entire router (i.e. WAN). Reaching the limit for either will shut down internet.

[JeffinTx]

Thanks, but that's not really what I need. Still wondering about my question, though, about nesting quotas.

[Lantis]

No you can't. You can't apply more than one quota to an IP address is my understanding.

As Eric said, the closest thing you can get to nesting is a quota per IP, and then one for all clients.

[nworbnhoj]

Nested quota's would be a good feature - but it would be a complex development. Someday, but not soon.

[JeffinTx]

Thanks for all the replies. Seems like Gargoyle is leading the way with Quotas as a feature on home routers, so kudos to the developers on this. It's a differentiator.

I don't expect it will make a difference, but to be clear, my situation does not call for any quotas per IP, it's all users daily and all users monthly to manage metered service. Maybe then, it's not even nested, as much as multiple or overlapping rules.

[twf85]

I'm a new user, so my apologies for resurrecting a seemingly closed topic.

The OP's point is something that interests me as well. I feel gluttonous by comparison, but Cox recently began enforcing transfer caps of 1TB per month, which is what drove me to find a solution that wasn't checking their usage reporting tool, daily.

I have setup usage policies to govern the whole of my network, as well as the few hogs that consume the bulk of data we use per month, but I find myself wanting some secondary control over the whole. I have a hard and fast kill switch on the whole set to 1024GB, but it would be nice to have a daily "soft" limit of say, 30GB, with Throttling enabled.

Ordinarily, this would never be an issue. It is only during the holidays, when there will be more unknown clients connecting to the WiFi and using data, that I can foresee potential risk. I have a policy in place for all clients that don't have an explicit policy set, which allots them 3GB per day. In my testing prior to Gargoyle, that seemed to be a safe limit. However, if we have a family dinner and suddenly there are 10+ more clients connected than normal, that could eat up a lot of data quickly if left unchecked.

The current workarounds for this that I can see involve:

• "Partition" off a block of data to be used during a party, estimate the duration of the party, and reduce global QoS so that it throttles the connection back to only consume the allotted partition for the given time frame.

• Reserve the IP of every permanent device, and give non-permanent device's a group block.

• Switch from a global allotment per month to per day during guest visits.

• Simply tell every permanent resident to go easy on the internet while guests are also using the internet.

While any of these might help offset the potential risk of added ISP fees, they are far from flawless solutions:

• Errors in estimation could easily derail the QoS rate limiting solution, and only really help if the guests are staying for less than 24 hours.

• Reserving each IP requires that all residents remember to report the acquisition of any new device or removal of any unused device

• The only potential problem I see with switching from a monthly global allotment to a daily, is that I don't know if Gargoyle will "remember" the monthly statics between switches (i.e. I don't know if it will reset back to zero).

• Many regular internet users are completely unaware of how much data they consume. I have one user in particular that thinks using 5GB in an hour is "normal" usage. So, telling people to "take it easy" is more of a relative suggestion and hard to quantify or project.

If Gargoyle never introduces the ability for multiple usage policies per rule, or multiple rules per address(es), then I will probably get to where I need to go through a combination of one or all of the proposed workarounds. It won't be pretty, but it will beat the pants off of the alternative.

To the developers, keep up the good work. Without Gargoyle, I would feel very much at the mercy of our ISP. It is downright amazing to me that a ~$30 used router on eBay can net so many benefits with Gargoyle loaded up.