Bandwidth nazi

[Richard Cottrill]

I don't have a 3Gb a month limit. This is through BT Internet, not Telstra.
Here (London) there's actually competition for broadband services. While
there's actually not very much in my area (beautiful Whitechapel) the cable
TV is a real competitor to BT and they provide a complete package so that
you can completely ignore BT if you want. The cable option is slower, but
very cheap.

ADSL is still controlled by BT because they have the keys to the exchanges.
Sounds familiar...

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-admin at lists.samba.org [mailto:linux-admin at lists.samba.org]On
Behalf Of Rasjid
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 11:09 AM
To: CLUG
Subject: Re: Bandwidth nazi


Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
>
> I believe you have a wetware problem. You could spend
> a lot of time partitioning bandwidth and still get user
> paranoia. Might be simpler to just keep load statistics
> and demonstrate the link never gets saturated anyway.
>
> Even taking into account peak usage happening between
> 6 and 9, you'll probably top the 3 Gb cap more often
> than you will saturate the link.
>
> Antti

I tend to agree with the above.  We have around 35 users at work over a
single ADSL link and except when Telstra are having problems performance
has been just fine.

As for actually sharing the connection, I highly recommend Smoothwall.
It will run quite happily on a 486.  I have not used it for ADSL,
although the latest version is supposed to deal with that easily.  The
configuration is very simple, and its transparent web proxy would make a
difference with regards reaching the 3GB cap, and also improve the
perceived speed.

It also has a nice load graphing function to prove how little the link
gets saturated, and for the (rightly) paranoid it is by all accounts a
very good firewall.

If you really want the load allocation, I'm fairly sure you could also
install cbq.init on Smoothwall.  You would simply need to install
iproute, provided that the Smoothwall kernel has the appropriate
support.

See ftp://ftp.equinox.gu.net/pub/linux/cbq/ as suggested previoiusly.

Also see http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Bandwidth-Limiting-HOWTO/

Cheers,

Rasjid.