Re: Limited broadband allowance - how to enforce in the house during the day

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/05/09 08:44, noel_pilot wrote:
> I'm using AAISP for my home broadband on their 3gb package (3gb
> download between 9am and 6pm I think it is then unlimited downloads
> off peak)

100Gig off-peak, and unmetered between 2 and 6am, upload always
unmetered, iirc.


> So....How can I stop it?  Ideally want a way to limit the total
> amount downloadable during those hours, guessing this is going to
> involve a router change but if it could be done by software that
> would run on a mac I could always use the proposed mac mini purchase
> to act as a gateway of some sort with all access going through it.

If it's just HTTP/FTP traffic, then squid would be a good place to start
(specifically the delay pools settings).  I use this on my network, with
delay pools set to give a 60kB/s average download rate during peak
hours, but with a 5meg 'bucket', so that bursting traffic (web pages)
appear at full speed.  Once 5 meg has been downloaded, the rate drops to
60kB/s until the download stops and the 'bucket' is allowed to refill
(at 60kB/s).

This works fine for my partner and I, as it makes streaming video
slightly annoying, doesn't noticeably interfere with web browsing, but
makes errant software updates to slow down enough that we can put a stop
to them before they've significantly eaten into our quota.  And being a
caching proxy, squid reduces the amount of download anyway (especially
when you've got multiple machines downloading the same OS updates).

Obviously this is only for HTTP/FTP.  It won't work for p2p apps.  This
isn't a problem for me, as I can trust myself to use them during the
off-peak/unmetered periods, but if you're trying to police your
housemate's use you're going to need some sort of time-dependant traffic
shaping or port-blocking on the router, I think.  I use M0n0wall, which
can do the sort of throttling you need, but not according to time of day
- though you could I suppose set up a cron job to re-configure it.


> Would also ideally like an override so if I need/want to do something
> and the limits been hit I can bypass.

That's fairly straightforward with a proxy, just disable it in the
browser.  Or have it configured with different limits for a given host,
or whatever.  Sounds like you're after a router-based solution, though,
possibly of the hand-crafted iptables variety.


Kim.
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