Topic: User Traffic Control

[hawk]

hi
I have a problem with students abusing the internet, i have been using sarg to monitor and web filtering for blocking, can anyone direct me in the right direction for a contrib i could install that will allow me to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth per user per month.

many thanks
john

[Stefano]

the short answer is: "you can't"

you'd do traffic shaping in front of your server, using something like m0n0wall, or other firewall oriented distro

All IMVHO

[guest22]

Another answer could be, depends on in which country you are, for in some countries filtering web access is illegal, even if they are students. Next to that, 'abusing internet' is very broad concept. Can you be more specific?

[hawk]

hi thanks for the info,
looked into m0n0wall but it has been discontinued. I would also prefer if i could get something that runs on SME.

We are in South Africa, and we can filter web access. When i mean abuse we have very limited internet.
I have a 4MB line speed and lucky if we get 2.5mb. Have an uncapped data account that gets throttled after about 150Gb of internet.
This is for about 120 students. Every new year we get the same problem, new students new devices, most of these devices have never been connected to the internet before and most of the students have never had internet before, so things like social networking is a new experience. The institution supplies free internet but only for educational purposes. Students get this internet 24/7, 90% of the usage goes on facebook, so now because the throttling we now block facebook. But the students have asked can they not be issued with a limited amount of bandwidth for a particular month, so those that want to abuse the system will get blocked when they have used their allocation.

I think that with internet getting more readily available around the world i might be taking a step backwards.

thanks
john

[Stefano]

I'd:

- filter web traffic using rules to block facebook and other social network.. you can do it with custom squid rules to block  authentication
- shape bandwidth using something in front of your server

[Stefano]

looked into m0n0wall but it has been discontinued.

there are many linux distro firewall oriented.. dozens

I would also prefer if i could get something that runs on SME.

not so easy.. if you search for "squid limit internet traffic quota" with google you'll see that:
- such a feature is not present in squid
- you need to install and configure sw, compiling it from source.. and maybe you need to install something on the clients

SME can be used as auth server via samba, radius and openldap..

[Stefano]

take a look here:

http://community.sitepoint.com/t/how-to-set-bandwidth-quota-on-user-in-squid-server/20749/6

http://www.ledge.co.za/software/squint/squish/

[Fumetto]

I use pfSense into a school enviroment as gateway; with squid, squidguard, snort and captive portal function the only difficulty was to enter data for each user, but you can also take them to a domain controller or a Kerberos servers (which are integrated in SME). With captive portal function can limit user by time usage, data usage...

SME can act as a gateway, but the advanced functions of a gateway are easier to manage with an firewall-gateway oriented distro.

[hawk]

hi thanks i will try pfsense

thanks