[Technical] A "real" world problem for consideration

[Wong, William C]

Hi Kevork,

What you need is a firewall with bandwidth management capability.  This
will allow certain traffic to go through or not to through; and traffic
that should take priority over others.  Something like Squid, IPCOP,
Smoothwall, or maybe m0n0wall will do such these.

As for the Download Usage Management, if you are talking about the
charging users for the internet, you could use Internet Charging
software, but software like those are not cheap and you need a proxy
server charge users by time or traffic.  

In the end, the cost lies on the Proxy Server software (If it is ISA
Server) and/or Internet Charging Software; plus the hardware require to
support them.  But since you currently have recycled hardware, that may
not be a problem.

Bill



-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Kevork Krozian
Sent: Friday, 21 April 2006 11:53 AM
To: tech at edulists.com.au
Subject: [Technical] A "real" world problem for consideration

Hi folks,

      In one of my other areas of interest I provide accommodation to
overseas students around a major university. 
One of these properties has an Optus cable modem internet link shared by
4 workstations through a switching router eg. Netgear or similar.

  Recently there has been a fair amount of tension between the students
playing the blame game of accusing each other of slowing down the
internet link or downloading more than their fair share ( 12GB link
midday to midnight, 3 GB each if all is fair   ---    20GB midnight to
midday, 5 GB each if the daytime limit is not breached ) for the month.


  The solution needs to be  two  ( maybe three ) fold:

                     1. Bandwidth management -- each user gets one
quarter of available bandwidth
                     2. Download usage management -- each user gets no
more than one quarter of the limit for the month. User can check
balance.
                     3. Not be so expensive to setup and maintain , that
it makes the solution more expensive than setting up individual ADSL
lines for each student.

   There is a linux solution --  between cable modema and switching
router --  ( no need for anything higher than a PIII to do the job )
using Squid to throttle bandwidth but this may be a hard limit eg.
50Kbps rather than " fetch current bandwidth, divide by four , update
bandwidth allowed for each " .  Any gateway running a Windows platform
solution will call for a high end machine and that alone makes any
solution prohibitive.  Or , divide available bandwidth by number of
users rather than by 4 as there may be bandwidth wasted if not everyone
is on the network.
   There is the issue of the rapidly fluctuating throughput measured eg.
It is not unusual for a machine at home on a small network to record
anything from 100Kbps to 400 Kbps during a short period depending what
else is happening. 

   So, any thoughts out there from my esteemed colleagues ??

Regards



Kevork Krozian
IT Manager , Forest Hill College
k.krozian at fhc.vic.edu.au
http://www.fhc.vic.edu.au
Mobile: 0419 356 034


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