Quite a few now offer a bandwidth limit, but if you want to stop a potentially 24hr-active P2P (torrent) user running up more than say 30GB/month, you need to set the bandwidth limit at a level which is too low for even watching a youtube video.
What is needed is a quota, say 1GB/day, which when reached cuts off the connection, until 00:00 the following day.
We have a £400 Draytek here which I think does that, but I am looking for something a lot cheaper, preferably with a built in ADSL modem.
Other clients i.e. ethernet connected PCs need to get the full access. The limit is just for WIFI - presumably it would be configured for the internal network IP range which is allocated by the DHCP server in the router. It might mean the ethernet-connected computer has to have a fixed IP, set outside the WIFI-DHCP range...
Any tips would be appreciated.
get a router and flash openwrt. There are plenty routers supported.
Yes, openwrt, dd-wrt or tomato will do the job nicely. Supported routers start from $20 or so at Chinese webshops like dx.com.
Unfortunately my hacking skills don't stretch to this.
Peter, the thing is pretty straightforward and well-documented. It would probably take you about an hour to read the manual and flash the firmware, or I'll be happy to do it for you at one of the upcoming fly-ins. Once flashed, you get a self-explanatory web-based admin interface.
I have heard of openwrt, but will it actually do this "out of the box"?
I am sure, for example, that a Cisco IOS router can do this. They can do just about anything. I used to "run" some Cisco ISDN routers, but had to pay a Cisco specialist to set them up. The IOS language is OK for trivial stuff but horrid for anything else.
The curious thing is that very few products do this. Looking through our £400 Draytek routers properly, it turns out they can't actually do it.
Draytek tell me the 2920 can be configured for it, in a very convoluted way.
To implement a quota, one needs to cut off the data (to the selected client IP range) when the limit is reached and then automatically re-enable it say for the next day at 00:00.
Yes, it will. I personally use Tomato, and on my box I can just throttle the bandwidth for the given IP addresses, and I can also bind an IP address to each known MAC address. Both operations take several seconds through the web interface. OpenWRT and DD-WRT are similar, the only question is whether a specific router model is supported. Actually, it can do a lot more than that. For example, my router (a 480 MHz MIPS processor with 128 MB RAM) currently doubles as a Samba fileserver and a VPN gateway. I am also thinking of setting up an e-mail gateway with mail sorting and spam rejection functions, but this takes some very careful planning. Just for bandwidth control, as little as 32 MB would suffice. A good, cheap and versatile router of this class is TP-Link TL-WR720N (the Chinese model, not the US one - these are two different routers under the same model number), which can be bought for 25-30 USD.
Peter, yes, Gargoyle is one of the web front ends to OpenWRT, an alternative to the standard LuCI.
