Gargoyle Forum

Hi all, I've been using Gargoyle for a couple of years now and its been very helpful in making my satellite internet connection usable but not abusable for guests at my Bed and Breakfast. Guests and devises change daily, and we ask nicely for them not to overuse the system, and most are fine. Most need just a web browsing experience but I have to defend against the occasional data abuser because of my 15GB/month data cap. I use QoS to subdivide and mildly throttle my users by IP, and hourly shut-down quotas to at least somewhat limit abusers, but not cut them off entirely or for too long during their stay. I also use the firewall to block certain things during daytime hours (e.g., windows updates), to make those happen overnight when our data usage is somewhat unlimited.

I have two questions about the capabilities of versions newer than the 1.6.2 I am currently using. 1) Do any have the ability to change/tailor the splash screen when a user hits his hourly quota and is shut down? It would be nice to be able to have it tell the abuser "nicely" what is happening. 2) Can QoS be limited to be active only during certain hours, as quotas can be? It would be nice to turn the QoS throttling off overnight when my satellite usage is in its unlimited hours, as I can with the quota setting.

FWIW I can't just further throttle the abusers when they hit a quota or it actually becomes counter-productive -- the modem will begin to re-request and re-meter data that is thrown away by the throttle (ultimately catastrophically, which I learned once the hard way). I've searched the forum and new versions features but can't find answers to these two probably not very common questions.

Thanks,

That looks like it's a script to reset a daily quota based on usage and days remaining in a system-wide monthly bucket (functionally, increasing the day N+1 bucket if day N uses less than its bucket). Useful for a single-user network I can see, but unfortunately that doesn't have a lot of utility for my situation.

I'm actually using gargoyle's functionality with pretty-good effect, without 90% of my users really even really noticing anything. Mainly I am trying to limit the abusers (many of them not even doing it knowingly; cloud sharing and OS updates go on in the background). And trying to do it without being too heavy-handed (i.e. cutting them off for an extended period).

The way I have it set up is working pretty well, with only a couple of rough spots. Being able to customize the "limit exceeded" splash screen would help explain to someone what may be going on with their device that warrants it being cut off, even for a brief period of time. Disabling QoS during our unlimited usage time will allow that device to complete its update/sharing; when throttled I see devices still trying to upload/download even after 6 un-quota'd hours (because the QoS throttle is always in effect). If I use the quota functionality to throttle users, then A) I can't use that quota functionality to limit a heavy abuser, and B) even throttled as much as I dare, individual usage can still be unacceptably high.