Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 21:57:04 +0930 From: Wincent Colaiuta <wincentcolaiuta@mac.com> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bandwidth billing and measurement scripts Message-ID: <DD446E42-837F-11D6-A68D-003065C60B4C@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <MBEKKDFNOOOCNGBGIOMHEEKCGFAA.bambi@Hughes.com.au>
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El Wednesday, 19 June, 2002, a las 03:10 PM, David J. Hughes escribió: > If you really need to do this for true volume numbers (rather than just > the > info you can glean from the log files) you could run a proxy in front of > your web server(s) (i.e. a reverse proxy, or distributor, or whatever > your > terminology dictates) and assign each virtual host a distinct private IP > address. In effect you allow the proxy box to act as an HTTP 1.1 to > HTTP > 1.0 gateway. Do your traffic accounting based on the private IP's > (using > ipfw on the proxy box or whatever method you choose) and your problem is > solved. I'm not saying I'd do it but it would give you what you are > looking > for (i.e. real IP accounting on 1.1 virtual hosts). Thankyou David (and others on this list) for the helpful responses. So far no one has given me exactly what I was after, and after a thorough search of freshmeat.net it is looking as though I will end up coding this thing myself. Because I want this thing to be stable, robust, and dependable enough to use as a reliable platform for billing, a design goal would be to build it out of simple, well-tested tools that are already present in a standard FreeBSD install. So we're talking here a collection of Perl and Bourne shell scripts interacting with ipfw and using dbm and perhaps some flat files for data storage, all driven by cron. What I'd like it to do: - run as an hourly cron job - count incoming and outgoing bandwidth user per IP based on ipfw "count" rules - this should give a totally accurate traffic count without the need to resort to parsing mail, http and ftp logs (which could get very messy) - measure % of traffic accounted for http, ftp, mail and "other" (an interesting statistic, but not really a useful one, seeing as in the end the customer has to pay for it all anyway) - save ipfw output to disc for safe keeping - update usage totals per customer in the dbm database: daily and monthly totals - when customer hits bandwidth quota for the month, send a warning email - when customer exceeds bandwidth quota by 25% or more, account temporarily suspended (browser redirected to an explanatory page using mod_rewrite), send customer notification email - generate simple HTML pages showing usage - provide an easy mechanism for adding/removing hosts/customers to/from the accounting system - able to administer from the shell or from a web-interface We choose to implement these last couple of somewhat draconian measures because here in Australia bandwidth is not cheap (about 20c/meg, incoming). We want to avoid any ugly situations where a customer manages to get slashdotted (or whatever) and finds themself with a horrid bandwidth bill (remember, here in Australia, bandwidth will cost them about $200/gig thanks to our monopoly telecommunications supplier, Telstra). We figure it's better to temporarily suspend the off account here and there than to have customers running up large bills that they later refuse to pay (or whatever). If they are pushing out so much data that they exceed their quote then they should be on a higher-volume plan, or host their site in the US... In any case, any further suggestions appreciated, but will send to the list a link to whatever I end up devising. Cheers Wincent To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the messagehelp
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