LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : Chris Yeoh <cyeoh@samba.org>
  Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 17:09:49 +0930

Re: DSL information / throughput

On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 12:11:29AM -0700, Chris Yeoh wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 12:14:04PM +0930, Simon Hackett wrote:
> >  And allowing anyone other than your immediate family from using the
> > service except under your direct personal supervision,
> 
> ... and in practice they enforce this how? :-) 
> 
> As someone mentioned in another thread it would be nice to be in
> someway cut-off from everyone but the ISP automatically if you exceed
> the cap. So if that java applet in netscape goes crazy when unattended
> one night you don't end up with a huge bill from your ISP.


Chris,

At last! I've been syaing for the last year that what Australia
needs is "budget shapers". The idea is that you set up a set of rules like:
-	no more than $30 in one hour
-	no more than $100 in one day
-	no more than $250 in one week
-	no more than $700 in one month

or something like that.
Then you set up a "budget shaper" which compares the bandwidth
usage against the rules and slows down the link to a crawl if
you exceed the limits, and send you an e-mail to alert you.

In fact, such things to exist for big ISPs in the US - to alert the
operator to the fact that a user may be exceeding their permitted
bandwidth.
E.g. see http://firehunter.comms.agilent.com/
(The web design on this site is really lamentable.)

But in the US, if the user suffers a bandwidth blow-out, e.g.
due to a DoS attack, squid abuse, run-away applet, leaving a videoconference
running overnight etc., the ISP is in trouble, because you don't
generally pay by the megabyte in the US.
But in Australia, if that happens, the user is in big trouble.
E.g. at 18 cents/Megabyte for 1 Mbit/sec, that's about
$58,300 in a 30-day month. If you get a monthly bill, that could
be very nasty.

As far as I know, there is no such thing as a "budget shaper"
on the market right now, but it could be cobbled together with
the linux QoS software.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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