Hello out there everyone. I need a small help. I am using a cable modem ISP. I am allocated a download limit of 300 megabytes per month only. Beyond this and i have to pay per extra mb downloaded. This is really irritating as I get huge bills every month.

NOW the help that i want is to know how to control the bandwidth usage with linux.

I am having a network of 10 computers. Redhat linux 8 is the gateway. I am using NAT - IP Masquerading implemented through IPTABLES for sharing the internet connection. I want only 10mb to be used everyday so that in a month the limit is not exceeded.

So how do i do this so only upto 10mb is used in a given day.

Regards

Because there are so many different ways of downloading info, chat, browsing, dns etc and they all count towards the volume, I would suggest a kernel module for netfilter (iptables) called quota.

You can then use iptables to fine tune the quotas against protocols, destinations, sources etc...

You will need to get this from the patchomatic download and apply this to your kernel sources and recompile your kernel.
You will have a new QUOTA option to select when you do Make menuconfig.
quotas are set by byte values and are valid for as long as the rule exists, so if you want a daily quota, restart the rules daily etc...