[FireWire]

Hi, sorry for the bad writing, the server logged me out and I lost the text I had written... To make it short:

Since I left for college many years ago, my father rents the remaining rooms in his house to other students. The rent includes free access to the Internet, which is provided with a regular router and a switch. Unfortunately, some people routinely exceed the bandwidth limit, and as a result everyone has to pay the associated fee, which is not fair for my father or the people who don't download a lot, because our current router doesn't offer the possibility to see each computer's usage.

I suggested we use a regular PC as a router, running Linux or Windows, as we'd buy an el cheapo computer. I thought I would find a lot of solutions online but so far I'm out of luck: there are many modified firmware for existing routers (like WRT54G) but I failed to find the solution I'm looking for. I thought about attributing static IP based on the MAC address of each PC. What I would like to do is:

• Track each PC's Internet usage by IP
• Provide some sort of statistics
• Assign a monthly quota and send an email to the user if it is almost reached
• Be able to slow down or shut off certain services (like BitTorrent) is the quota is reached (during the day only, as downloads are unlimited at night), via QoS or bandwidth shaping

The router would be run headless in the basement and I'd like an easy to use web interface so my father could monitor the stats and make small changes himself easily (like add a MAC address or change the quota). Ideally the solution would be free and open-source, and easily customizable.

Thank you!

[seanc]

Smoothwall - with addons provided by the community that must be installed manually.
PFSense - with addons provided by the package manager that are installed for you.

[FireWire]

Thank you! I will look into that when I get home!

[Edit] I just noticed Smoothwall is a kernel of its own. Is it still possible to use the PC for other uses? I forgot to mention that I was more looking for a software add-on, as I will probably use the PC as a backup server for his MBP and possibly for other tasks. If it's not possible it's not dramatic, as I will find other alternatives.

Anyway your suggestions seem interesting so far! thank you!

[seanc]

No, both of these solutions are their own OS, the PC will perform one operation.
It doesn't need to be a powerful PC - 2nd hand PCs are cheap.

I should add, that both of those solutions won't do what you want out of the box, but you should be able to customize them to some degree.

[FireWire]

I don't mind messing around to customize the options, as long as I don't have to recompile the kernel

Do you happen to know a solution that would work on top of an existing OS, so I could use the PC as a mail and backup server?

I guess it's technically possible to modify the kernel to add those options but as my unix knowledge is pretty limited, I would like to avoid messing with that

[Cold Warrior]

MasterShaper - MasterShaper

Maybe. Did some quick research, not much.