Mac OS X Server - quota and speed limits for mac clients

[valdigre]

Hi,

Me and my friend are thinking about rebuilding our home network in such a way, that there is a total control over what client mac/inux/windows computers are doing with Internet connection.
We have a 10 gigabyte limit on our internet connection, but it is split over 5 people, so you can imagine that it is so easy to download more then we should.

We want to control how much everyone is downloading from the internet through mac os x server proxy (lets say each computer on the network may download during a month max 2 gigabytes) and having badwith options for each client would be nice as well (if there are two people downloading at the same time, 1 mbit connection is split over them, and so on).

Does Os X server give you these kind of options?

 

[DHagan4755]

Yes and no. You can use OS X Server to quota the storage on network home directories so long as the network home directories are stored on another drive on the server. I am not aware of any software for OS X or OS X Server that throttles bandwidth of the users that are pointed to the server as the gateway. If someone else knows, please post!

 

[valdigre]

Thanks for the reply.

I did not mean the storage quota on the server, but quota for how much does a client user can download from internet, through the mac os x server.

Is there a functionality, which counts and sums up, that client 192.168.1.23 has downloaded yesterday 100 megabytes from internet (through the proxy), and he can download only 1900 more till the 1st day of each month.

Thanks

 

[luki3k5]

What about Dummynet / IPFW ?

As far as I know this is build in into MAC OSX (BSD heritage)

man ipfw

would do the job I guess... anyone has better idea ?
Quick google search shows a lot of results about how to shape your traffic
through that tool. I am not using it myself so I am not 100% certain it will do what you need, still it will allow you to limit transfer based on user's basis & their computers IPs etc.

BTW 10GB quota sux! It is Eircom is it not ?

All the best

 

[luki3k5]

One more thing - I wonder if I could use MAC MINI to do as a server...

One more thing - I wonder if I could use MAC MINI to do as a server/gateway with connection share through AirportExpress for more than 3-5 hosts?

Thanks
Lukasz