How to prevent us from going over the FAP Limit?

[belikeyeshua]

Your suggestions please..

We have Hughes Satellite Internet and we are allowed 500MB/day with free downloads between 2:00 and 7:00AM. Our problem is that its so easy to go over the limit. We have a 5 user network. I really think that squid and videocache is helping a lot.

So, I could get squid delay pools to work. Currently I hardly even know what that is. See, the problem is that we need speed while its also not fair for someone to be downloading a 5-20MB file and everyone else suffers.

Today, I opened up this youtube client called minitube. I searched for a video, and it said that it needed the H.264 codec in order to play them. I left the client open and searched for the codec online. I could not find the answer so I posted in the Gentoo Forums and went on to something else. Shortly after, I found that we were over the limit. I reasoned that it was because of all the stuff I downloaded yesterday to get videocache to working, plus a couple videos that I did as a test run.

Then I found out that this minitube thing must of been downloading the videos in the background…somehow. Because the videos that showed up in /var/log/videocache/videocache.log are all the same kind of videos as what I searched for in my minitube client and they all came from my IP address.

Well, I'm not going to ask you guys how I can get minitube to not download videos ;). Is there a way that I can somehow put a limit on our network?

I like the delay pool idea but sometimes I think that would be at our disadvantage. Especially when I need to download LARGE files in the middle of the night... if they get delayed so that all other traffic gets throttled, then the downloads might not finish by 7:00 and then we would end up getting ourselves into trouble again.

I guess I could somehow set it up so that this thing pops up that says "warning, you have 5 MB left and then you will be browsing the web at 50kb/sec. Please close all web browsers now." But I don't know if I like the sound of that.

So, your suggestions would really be appreciated. Oh yeah... we have satellite because we live out in the mountains where we can't even get a cell phone signal let along cable, DSL, etc. etc. So, a 2MB/sec $129/99/month hughes satellite connection is about the best we can get without spending more for a 3MB/sec signal. And, I like the sound of a 3Mb/sec signal except that the faster the internet is... the more likely we are to use too much of it.

Thanks a lot,
~Shawn

[XIII]

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,22120.0.html
talks about monthly, should/might be able to use it for daily.

use traffic shaper with schedules, throttles/slows connection when user/device gets greedy.