Internet Bandwidth Control

stevenma188 · Jun 29, 2009, 3:57 AM

I live in a house with 3 other students. All 4 of us use the internet expensively, but we have a 60 GB bandwidth limit. After exceeding our limit, we are charged $2 for each GB we go over. Then every month it becomes a huge headache trying to figure out who used how much bandwidth and how the additional costs should be split.

I was thinking of using pfSense so that we can monitor how much total traffic (Up and Down) each MAC address has been using. A bonus feature would be to block MACs after they exceed the 15GB per person limit.

Will I be able to do this?

mhab12 · Jun 29, 2009, 2:26 PM

I would also install squid simply to reduce your chances of going over the 60gb cap. Make sure you make the necessary changes to enable dynamic content caching (for sites like YouTube etc.) Search the forums to find out how to do this as well as the answer to your bandwidth measurement questions.

tommyboy180 · Jun 30, 2009, 5:39 PM

That would work in most cases. Are your room mates also using torrents and other streaming protocols?

The reason I ask is because Squid will only report on port 80 traffic. I found two posts that should put you in the right direction:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,6679.0.html
&
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,14258.0.html

tester_02 · Jul 1, 2009, 5:39 AM

@tommyboy180:

That would work in most cases. Are your room mates also using torrents and other streaming protocols?

The reason I ask is because Squid will only report on port 80 traffic. I found two posts that should put you in the right direction:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,6679.0.html
&
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,14258.0.html

While I currently do not need this feature, I think it's a really good feature if implemented.
Since pfsense is running so nice right now, I thought it would be something interesting to play with (or at least learn about).
Anyways, I did read the links you mentioned, but they seem to both go to a dead end. Some hope in 2.0, but otherwise I did not see a solution.
Back to reading and more seaches…..
If I run out of things, it's OPENVPN, or getting freeswitch to run properly again..... :)

stevenma188 · Jul 4, 2009, 6:56 AM

I read both links, and my understanding are that both didn't offer any instructions for me to follow. I am very new to all of this, and didn't understand a lot of the technical jargin and reference to various programs (ie IPFW). Anyways, I guess I will keep looking and learning…

jigpe · Jul 9, 2009, 5:26 AM

Traffic shaper under Firewall>Traffic would do that i guess. You can also use lightsquid to report everything http except https.

jigp
Davao City
1.2.2

stevenma188 · Jul 11, 2009, 3:34 AM

Hi jigpe, thanks for the reply. Does traffic shaper report overall bandwidth usage or would it be able to split up per MAC address?
Thanks

Kreeblah · Jul 13, 2009, 5:26 PM

I did something like this when Comcast implemented their 250 GB monthly cap, as none of us were really sure how much bandwidth we were using. What I did was install the pfflowd package in pfSense and then used NfSen on my file server to capture the netflow packets pfflowd generated and analyze data from them. It was kind of a pain to get NfSen set up, but it was worth it in the end. If you do go this route, though, you'll want to reserve an IP address with the DHCP daemon for each MAC address you want to track, as I don't believe you can get that from the data the NfSen logs.

stevenma188 · Jul 16, 2009, 3:03 PM

Hi Kreeblah,
What do you mean set up NfSense on your file server? does this mean I just set it up on the computer running PFSense?
Thanks

jigpe · Jul 18, 2009, 12:14 AM

stevenma188: "Hi jigpe, thanks for the reply. Does traffic shaper report overall bandwidth usage or would it be able to split up per MAC address?
Thanks"

Traffic shaper i guess have no real time records. Try install lightsquid you can see whos eating lots of files or who download big files. You can try bandwidth package too.

jigp
Davao City
1.2.2