WRT54G v5.0 - limit data?

Hi All,

My mother in law has a wrt54g v5 and a bunch of students staying with
her.

Where they live the internet is quite fast, but they only get 5gig a
month.

Is there a way to on a monthly basis assign each mac address say 1gig?

I couldnt find any 3rd party firmwares that would have such a feature?

Cheers

-Al

BigAl.NZ@gmail.com hath wroth:

>My mother in law has a wrt54g v5 and a bunch of students staying with
>her.

Offer her my sympathies.

>Where they live the internet is quite fast, but they only get 5gig a
>month.
>Is there a way to on a monthly basis assign each mac address say 1gig?
>I couldnt find any 3rd party firmwares that would have such a feature?

I don't know of any way to enforce an individual traffic quota system
inside the router.

If your WRT54G v5 could support SNMP (it doesn't), you could monitor
the traffic, break it down by IP or MAC address, accumulate the
results, and plot the data. It's not particularly difficult, but is
not a trivial project. It would use SNMP in the router and MRTG or
RRDTool for data collection and graphing.

Before I supply implementation details, please ask yourself if you
want to:
1. Replace your router or update your router firmware with something
that supports SNMP. The v5 version is not a very good router.
2. Dedicate a computer for data collection that is running full time.
3. Monitor the graphs monthly and inform the culprit that they've
exceeded their monthly quota.

If that's too complicated, you can extract traffic statistics from
your WRT54G v5 using WallWatcher:
<http://www.sonic.net/wallwatcher/>
The catch is that it requires SNMP, which means you get to install
alternative firmeware in your WRT54G v5:
<http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_your_WRT54G_or_WRT54GS_v5_series_%28v5%2C_v5 .1%2C_v6%29>
Oops. Won't work. No SNMP in the mini or micro versions for v5.

Some other references for traffic measurement:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_traffic_measurement>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_management>

Methinks something more practical would be to display the total
traffic near the end of the billing period and ask for voluntary
reduction in traffic. My guess is your unspecified ISP probably has
an account admin web page that has the aggregate traffic statistics
for the account. If one of the students is clueless, I'm sure the
other students will offer him or her a clue just after you pull the
plug on everyone. Think of it as incentive enforcement.

Incidentally, my average daily usage is about 200MBytes. I don't see
how I could survive on 1Gbyte/month. Is this sharing a cellular data
connection?


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558