Traffic shaping + download limits on home network?

Phil99

Phil99

Phil99

Soldato
Joined
29 Oct 2004
Posts
10,884
I've just moved on to a partially limited service (Eclipse Evo Option 3) so am looking at a way to monitor my peak time usage + do some other stuff I've been thinking of trying for a while.

Basic situation at the moment is:

ADSL -> Router -> 4 PCs using IPs from my block of 8

What I want to do is:

ADSL -> Router -> Old PC -> 4 PCs using IPs from block of 8

With the old PC running some sort of linux distro that will enable me to:
  • Prioritise traffic so uploading doesn't affect gaming or other latency sensitive applications (ACK prioritisation?)
  • Limit WAN traffic to 30GB between 6pm - 12pm and display a notice when the limit is near or has been reached
  • Run a basic FTP server to store some backup files on

I had a quick look at smoothwall but it doesn't look like it'll do any traffic management, just firewalling?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! :)
 
IPCop will do the first one, the second one too with a cron job (though I dunno about the notice).

As for monitoring, I threw together some PHP to generate graphs from the ones I was creating in Cacti anyway (it takes a start and end time in *nix format, so I used PHP to generate appropriate times).
 
Almost any linux distro will do all those things. You just need IPtables, a few other simple tools, and a few scripts. You will have to make sure you set up the firewalling properly as you have a block of publicly accessable IPs... how are you firewalling currently?

BTW, you won't need the router anymore, the Linux box will be a far superior router. You want to go:

ADSL -> Old PC -> Switch -> 4 PCs using IPs from block of 8

You can use the old router as a switch if you want but an 8 port 10/100 switch doesn't cost much.
 
PRTG will monitor Bandwidth usage though the old PC.....I'm not sure if it can alert you when Bandwidth hits 30GB, i haven't played much with the custom SNMP bits but most SNMP agents should allow you to set custom alarms and bandwidth should be a valid varyable.

I'm kinda looking into the same thing, i want to set my alarm at 0MB/s so it warns me when a WAN link goes down.
something like PRTG installed on the gateway PC should allow you to send and recieve SNMP Traps at certain usage levels.
However Linux does do most of this from what i hear so if you confident in using it, i'd go that route.

EDIT: Just checked the manual, PRTG can send e-mail notifications on bandwidth usage in MB per day.
It also has a billing facility that i was unaware of. Can be useful for sponging flatmates.:p
 
Last edited:
tolien said:
IPCop will do the first one, the second one too with a cron job (though I dunno about the notice).

As for monitoring, I threw together some PHP to generate graphs from the ones I was creating in Cacti anyway (it takes a start and end time in *nix format, so I used PHP to generate appropriate times).
Click to expand...

That cacti looks very good, definitely a bookmark for later times when I get a second box built up to have another play on *nix.

Maybe Im just a sucker for pretty graphs..... :o :p
 
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