hi there,

i dont know how it works on the rest of the world but in my country ( Portugal ) the bradband internet providers have a limit on how many downloads you may do per month, and in case you excede that limit you have to pay more. for example: netcabo.pt its the most known cable provider on Portugal and you may do 20GBs of national downloads and only 1 GB of international downloads. if you exced, you have to pay more for each 100mgs. so i was thinking about making an application that monitors the national and international internet traffic and also has serveral options like: "disable international traffic" and that would make every international downloads on every program unavailable. on a browser or on a p2p program it would stop inter downloads. also sevral other options like enabling inter traffic for mozilla browser and disable inter traffic for xmule.

ive been programming in C++ for almost 3 years know and im very confortable with it. also i have basic knowledge of socket programming. my interests on programming have allways been on the field of games, and although ive been using linux for almost an year ive never programmed for it, only for windows (and on that system ive programmed several projects and games). so what im asking is if you could indicate me any documentation or paper about linux network programming, linux network control. ive heard about iptables and i thinks maybe its the best thing to use, so ill ask papers about that to. also every documentation and/or paper you think it might be relevant to this projects please show them to me. if anyone didnt understand anything about what im trying to do please ask. this project its to help the protuguese community but i can make it international.

thanks a lot for your time.

PS: sorry the mispelling.

I think that you should also look into www.squid-cache.com will not only save on downloads with the caching features but you can set domain names etc that should be allowed... You can also use it to block Yahoo and MSN (which do take up bandwidth and downloads) as well as get rid of prgrams like kazaa which most offices have problems with downloading music etc...

Hope this helps

here is a document in Linux Network Programming http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2333