hard ware for QoS type features.

[shonen]

I received an email from a friend of mine today who has had enough of his two son's having domestic spat's over the amount of bandwidth they each consume at home. In his email he made a point of specifying the following feature's.

1. Allocate download limits per machine.

2. Restrict download speeds per machine.

3. Create access control to internet, days/times/hours per machine.

In a home environment I personally don't see the point of restricting download speeds per machine and scheduled time's for internet connections. The way I see it is he would get the results he requires by implementing just the download limits per machine. I made mention of this in my reply and am waiting on clarification to weather or not all the features are necessary.

In a nut shell I am asking for advice as to what vendor equipment could be used and if there are any modd's or such to do this to reach a desired outcome.

I did briefly mention that smoothwall could be used but I will have to take a look at the QoS options that are available seeing as I can't exactly remember what features are provided.

Also seeing as this person is not exactly an avid techno nut, something with an easily configured web interface or such would be the way to go. I will more than likely be setting this up but I do not wish to turn into that "GUY" if you know what I mean.

Thanks in advance for the help fellas, its much appreciated

[DingleBerries]

If its windows you can do all of that without extra hardware. This is a post on how to setup SquidProxy to do that;

http://sukka.jct.ac.il/~yedidia/squid_limit/

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Network-Tools...l-Edition.shtml

Or follow this step by step and set up a cron job to turn on and off the nic at certain times

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-1886-enabl...he-command-line

[shonen]

Awesome, I never knew that and shall take a look at the linkage you provided. Thanks mate

EDIT:

Also if there are any hardware options available I would like to know. The idea is to give him a couple of options.

[DingleBerries]

The second link is just a bandwidth shaping tool and I cannot give reviews on any of that, since i havent used it. I can try the third one, which imo is the easiest solution. Just give him the exe and a bat file. Have that bat file create 2 new bat files then add a cron job... is it cron in windows?

[shonen]

No need for a write up mate you have given me a fair amount of info as is and it is a nice work around instead of setting up an expensive server.

Not sure how his boys are going to like having their admin rights revoked.

[lnxr0x]

If you have an old PC that would otherwise be junk you could throw PFsense on it and use the traffic shaper to limit downstream and upstream bandwith based on LAN IPs. (I know you don't want to use extra hardware, but it's still an option)

http://pfsense.com

As far as stability/reliability my PF box has been UP for 68 days (thats when I installed it) running a squid proxy for content filtering (in addition to using OpenDNS) and SNORT for basic IDS. The actual hardware is a PIII 933, 18gig HD, 512MB RAM

[DingleBerries]

The only issue I see with using an extra piece of hardware is shonen will be the one called out there to fix it when it breaks. With software is pretty easy to manage users who /may/ have no idea what they are doing.