[clug] Tracking network usage

[Ben]

Half-fix A:
I have a friend who lives in a house with an "overly keen" p2p user. He just
sets his router (Billion 7402VL) to throttle the p2p port ranges. Though the
Billion 7402 series would only be an option if you are on ADSL, and want to
give some control over to a hardware solution.

The 7402VL can be set to any IP (range), any port (range) and throttle in
multiples of 32kbps, up, or down with a shared time schedule. There's also
the option to prioritise traffic based on an IP (range) or port (range).
There's 10 slots for up, 10 for down, 10 for priority and 16 timeslots, (the
timeslots are 7 day, not monthly unfortunately)
---
Half-fix B:
How does your ISP give you download information? It may be easier to
autoblock p2p port ranges (by IP/MAC/?) based on the amount of usage left /
days left. A separate (more lenient?) block could be set for game ports.
---

I've spend a long time trying to find simple (server side) bandwidth
metering solutions, and I didn't come across anything that wasn't very
expensive. Perhaps you could even try client side monitoring, depending on
how amenable and trustworthy the users are.

Andrew Smith's suggestion to use openradius looks interesting.
Are there any gotchas, regarding differences between openradius and
freeradius? (also GPL)
Or any other open source radius servers worth considering? I'd like to use
something that can be used on small scale, but with the possibility of
larger implementations.

Regards,

Ben Schreiner

On 10/11/05, Neill Cox <neill at ace-hosting.com.au> wrote:
>
> I have a home network with a number of untrusted clients (ie teenage
> children
> who last month chewed through 80% of my bandwidth allocation in 50% of the
> month).
>
> In order to avoid having *my* usage throttled by my ISP I want to more
> closely
> monitor the usage by individuals.
>
> For some of the machines this is easy as they are only used by one person.
> For
> others several different people log on and it's harder to associate
> traffic with
> a particular person.
>
> I'm wondering if there is any way to associate a DHCP request with a
> username/password, ie make people authenticate before handing them a DHCP
> lease.
>
> Just to make it more fun my network has Linux, Mac and Windows clients.
>
> I'm running a Debian based firewall (configured using shorewall) and a
> squid
> proxy, so I can track web usage now, but it's all the p2p and games that
> are harder.
>
> I have googled and I get the impression that some universities are doing
> something similar, but I don't know enough to zero in on any useful
> information.
>
> Any pointers/cluebats gratefully received.
>
> Cheers,
> Neill
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