Help me devise a bandwidth management scheme

[maxwolfie]

For our household -

We have 25gb 2am - 8am (offpeak) and an additional 25gb 8am - 2am (peak). Three users in total - two heavy users, one "email/facebook" user. We are on an ADSL2+ plan, synces at approx 5mbits (down), 500kbits or thereabouts up. We are capped to 128kbits to that specific timeframe (i.e. peak or offpeak).. I.e. if we go over on peak, we are still uncapped for offpeak (I think? Could be wrong)

Basically I want to set up a framework that takes into account our 25gb/25gb allowance and the above factors.

Any suggestions as to the best way to go about this? It's a bit more complicated with 1.) the seperate peak / offpeak allowances and 2.) the capped speeds, i.e. the max bandwidth to share will be substantially less once capped for that "timeframe"

EDIT: Also, I've just noted the remote access functionality - This is great, however, is the most secure way of doing this purely through https, or is http fine? I assume https, but will it make any difference? I suppose password selection is more relevant in terms of how secure it is.

[BikeMike]

I think perhaps you are trying to make it more complicated than it needs to be. Presumably the goal is fair usage for all, and never (or rarely) going over your monthly limit and getting shaped.

I have an almost identical situation, just more users (3 kids, 2 adults). We hardly use any of our off-peak so I just ignore it. Divide the monthly peak allowance by 30 days, then divide by number of people. But probably they will not all use all their allowance every day, so say double it. This would give around 500Mb per day per user as a starting point. Set this up and monitor your total usage as the month passes. Adjust up or down as necessary. If one user is consistently using all their allowance every day maybe just tighten it for that user.

That was my method, hope it helps.
Mike

[maxwolfie]

Thanks Mike

I was hoping that I could implement a system that doesn't "hard cap" (and presumably bar Internet access completely) a user if they exceed, say 500mb a day. But rather taper their speeds down further and further if they go crazy with downloading.

This is also to control my usage, not just others, as sometimes I completely forget how much I've really downloaded the the month.

[florachan]

I hope that it could drop the speed too instead of hard cap once the qouta is reached ... I wonder if there a place that I could hard code this in the shell script ?

[Eric]

It's not a shell script though... currently the quota rules are initialized using a program (written in C) called restore_quotas in the gargoyle_firewall_util package. You would have to edit and recompile that to update it.

I am, however, thinking about implementing the feature you request in the near future.

[maxwolfie]

I think there's two ways of tackling this:

1. Limiting quota before we are capped
To prevent becoming capped at all in the first instance

2. Limiting bandwidth AFTER we are capped
I guess the bandwidth itself is not the important thing when we are NOT capped... It's only important when we are capped (as it's really damn slow)

Considering that there is no real way of Gargoyle knowing when we are capped, Option 1 seems to be the only option?

EDIT: Another question, what exactly is the "bleeding edge" version, how do I get it and what differences are there? I'm currently using the Final 1.0 version.

[florachan]

It's not a shell script though... currently the quota rules are initialized using a program (written in C) called restore_quotas in the gargoyle_firewall_util package. You would have to edit and recompile that to update it.

I am, however, thinking about implementing the feature you request in the near future.

Hi Thanks Eric, how soon is that near future ? .. is that something in 2-3 weeks ? really excited about this

[xpfalcon]

Divide the monthly peak allowance by 30 days, then divide by number of people. But probably they will not all use all their allowance every day, so say double it. This would give around 500Mb per day per user as a starting point.

Mike

Mike, How do the users know how much each they have used without having to allow everyone in the household access to the Gargoyle controls?

I have a similar situation to yours (4 kids) and each month its one pointing to the other saying its not me its them who used the most.

I like the idea of dividing up the monthly bandwidth but feel that each user would need to know how much they have used to make it really useful to them.

On the Peak /Off Peak situation......

I have not yet installed Gargoyle yet as I am not experienced in router flashing and have not built up enough confidence to jump in but in the Linksys firmware (I have wrt54GL) you can set different rules for access based on times. Couldn't you restrict access only during peak and have no restrictions during off-peak. My off-peak is Midnight to Midday, so if the kids have big downloads I tell them to wait until the morning, or on weekends.
Can you restrict access via rules ( like in the Linksys firmware) in Gargoyle?

[BikeMike]

Each user can view their own usage on the Gargoyle login page, WITHOUT logging in. So just bookmark the page and they can check it anytime. (Actually if they are clever they can figure our everyone else's usage too. hint.... view page source!)

Quotas can be given effective times, so you can have a quota for peak times only. I have not tried adding 2 separate quotas for peak/offpeak to the same IP address, so not sure if that works but no reason why it shouldn't.

Edit: Just tried this, you can't do it... Duplicate IP -- only one quota per IP is allowed.

I'm not sure if your question relates just to download quotas, or also restricting access to the internet for the kids. Gargoyle is very flexible with this, you can have different cut-off times per child, different for weeknights & weekends, etc. Limit MSN use, P2P etc. also.

[xpfalcon]

Edit: Just tried this, you can't do it... Duplicate IP -- only one quota per IP is allowed.

Can you just apply restriction during peak time and no restriction during off-peak time?