Gargoyle Forum

I have up to 4 homestay students with pcs and need to measure and charge each individually for data used by their monthly net activity.
I use both wired and wireless. Students are all wireless at present.
How can I do this without being too invasive or putting software in their pcs?- could I measure their use at the router with ip address logs? Can I use a Linksys and install software to do this? It is a common enough problem that doesn't seem to have a straight forward solution, or does it?
ANY IDEAS -
ps I have a (made 4 nz market) CYBER 54m router that has VIRTUAL SERVER, PORT MAPPING, NAT , ALG, QOS, IP QOS, remote manage. The help files in the router are badly written by someone whose English is imperfect...

Hi John,
Gargoyle can do what you need, but you'll need to set up a fixed IP for each new student's PC (do they change often?). It can measure usage per IP and also enforce quotas if necessary. All the setup is done on the router, you don't need access to their PCs.

I don't know about your router, it's likely you'll need to replace it with something that can run Gargoyle.

Thanks mate, just got a used Linksys (Cisco) WRT54GL and will get to it and load software this evening. Should be all good to go. The ips can be fixed presumably so I'm set.. hopefully?..no more data hogging Chinese, Saudis or Brazilians, pay as you go or go damn SLOOOOOW.

nzjohn wrote:... or go damn SLOOOOOW.

Note that gargoyle interrupts the connection once the quota is reached (ie. the device gets 0 kb/s).
Eric is working on implementing the abililty to throttle speed once quota has been reached (see here) but at the moment you would need to provide a separate slow speed network for students to use as an alternative once quota is reached.

He mentioned charging them for usage rather than cutting them off with a quota. Perhaps a combination of monitoring/charging, and somehow using QOS to limit their effect on his own internet experience, would be what is needed?