Manage Internet quotas and limits.

[Nathan Snow]

I have cableone, unfortunately, and must upgrade to their 50Mb plan. I have no choice in the matter and they are the only ISP in my area.

The Issue: I have many devices in my house. My current average bandwidth usage is around 400-600 GB a month. I have to get that down to 50 GB. My family uses Netflix heavily and other bandwidth consuming software and programs. Our router has network limiting features including internet quota monitoring with an off switch when the limit is reached. However, Cableone has said in their terms and services that from 12:01 AM - 7:59 AM internet usage will not count towards our limit. I cannot program my router with that schedule, when 50 GB is reached it shuts off. That is my only option with that.

Possible Solution: I am looking for a distribution of Linux that will serve as a traffic cop between my modem and router. It would need to solve my issues above and be somewhat easy to manage. I am not looking for something that will take weeks or months of time to get working. I have school and am limited on time and cannot afford to have our network down for and extended period of time. I have heard of IPCop and ZeroShell; however I have used neither. They both sound like they might have the features I am looking for, but I am not 100% sure that they will suit my needs. I found them while researching my issues on Google.

If anyone has input that will solve my issues, I would be grateful.

[Rob]

Hey Nathan,

I haven't used IPCop or ZeroShell before - have you looked at untangle at all? http://www.untangle.com

[Nathan Snow]

I had a look at untangle, and the bandwidth management features seemed like what I was looking for. However, it was $270 a year. I'm looking for a Linux distro as a free solution. It's only for a home solution, nothing that expensive will be an option.

[Stefano Messicano]

You could install a central proxy server (I think it is too complicated) or another way of doing it is to install in each pc networx (or any other data controlling app) and dividing the amount of quota that you have assigned to each user.There must another way, yet I am not aware of it, sorry.

[Jason King]

Look into squid it's pretty easy to do this with. Also you can cache your most visited web pages so that helps limit your bandwidth.

You could install a central proxy server (I think it is too complicated) or another way of doing it is to install in each pc networx (or any other data controlling app) and dividing the amount of quota that you have assigned to each user.There must another way, yet I am not aware of it, sorry.