Connection Limits / Quotas

[todius]

First off, sorry for the long question:
Hi all. I started out with Tomato a couple years back, moved to DD-WRT and just recently switch to Gargoyle. For what I'm trying to acheive, Gargoyle seems to be the best match.

Let me describe my scenario and maybe someone will have the answer. I have neighbors that rent a barn on the same property I rent. They have a DVR with remote internet access capability to monitor their horses at night while they're away. Since they're in a barn, they can't get internet wired to the place so I agreed to link them into mine via a wireless bridge.

I have all that working fine. Maybe a little too well, in fact. My problem has been that the neighbors forget to log out of their viewing software and leave it running all day and night. The overall bandwidthon the DVR is set to the lowest possible (128kbps), but this adds up to about 1GB a day. Eventually, my service provider throttles back my upload speeds to a crawl until the end of the the month because of the total amount of data used. I've tried explaining this to the neighbor, but they're not "computer savvy".

So, I began looking for firmware to use with my WRT54GL that would allow data quota upload limitations and throttle back on their upload connection when they reached a limit. This works fine in Gargoyle... I set say a limit of 500MB per day, throttle them back to a crawl, and have it reset at night.

I don't like doing it this way, though. If the neighbors need to use the internet later that day, the connection is very slow (because it's throttled back).

Instead, I figured I might use the "connection bytes" feature of the upload QOS in the latest version of firmware.

This is what I'd like to acheive: Allow the remote user to utilize the upload connection at full speed until maybe 50MBs have been used, then throttle the connection back forcing the user to close the software and reopen before it will return to full speed. (This way, if the neighbor forgets to close the software, it throttles back to very slow and uses much less data, but if they're actually trying to view it, they can close it and reopen the connection to have back at full speed until that 50MB limit is reached again.)

This ALMOST works in Gargoyle. I monitor the connection list to the DVRs IP and sure enough, once the threshold is reached, the QOS kicks in and slows it down.... problem is, the DVR viewing software recognizes the connection has slowed and opens a new connection (the DVR software maintains 4 connections to the IP simulatneously). In order for this to work, I need the QOS to monitor ALL connections (not the individual instances) to the single IP and throttle ALL connections to that single IP back. Is this possible? Is there some other way to acheive what I'm after?

Thanks,
Brent

[pbix]

You seem to have tried most of the features that can help you in Gargoyle already. The connection bytes feature works on a connection basis. The quota feature can work on an IP basis. If you can configure the DVR software to not switch connections you can get what you want using the connection bytes feature but I cannot think of anything else a router could do to help you.

It seems to me that the best you can do is set up daily resetting quotas on their IP address and tell them that is the limit each day. You can convert that into "minutes of video" per day they are allowed so they can understand. I think they will figure out quickly that they better log off or they will not be able to use their system.

The other approach is to get a quote for more volume from your ISP and ask your tenant if they want to foot the bill to maintain a constant video link.

[todius]

Thanks for the response.

I've set up a twice a day quota. One that resets early in the morning and one that resets in the afternoon. This way, they can use it for a couple of hours in the morning or evening before getting throttled.