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Charles W Downing wrote:
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On 06/10/2011 12:06 PM, Jim Ockers wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4DF25D12.7050100@ockers.net" type="cite"> <font
size="+1"><tt>Hi CLUEbies,<br>
<br>
Well as you know I send an e-mail to this list whenever I'm kind of
stumped. I have an OpenWRT based Linux system with a 3G phone
interface. Due to the marketecture of 3G data plans, I need to try to
make sure this device does not exceed its monthly bandwidth allotment
per our data plan, so we don't get a $60,000 bill, or something. What
I was thinking was, since we are allowed 5GB in a month, that I would
figure out the total bandwidth used in the last 3 weeks, and if the
total bandwidth was 3/4 * 5GB then I would start throttling down the
available bandwidth on the interface using tc and traffic shaping.<br>
<br>
This seems like it should not be too hard to do.<br>
</tt></font></blockquote>
Just an off the wall thought. Does your provider keep a running total
of your usage during a billing period? If so, it seems that you could
make a cron job to do the searching, leaving you to script the local
stuff. BTW, I just checked and Verizon Wireless keeps a running total
of my/our usage to the nearest kB.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
Yes, it's Verizon. They update their statistics every 24 hours and
don't have a convenient API to get the data, which makes it sort of
manual. The stats are not available in real time. We are looking at
nPhase which would overlay their APIs on top of Verizon, and might
allow us to automate some of this. We will probably do that anyway
just to make sure we don't ever get a huge phone bill from an overage
on one of these - like the guy who watched an NFL game on his cell
phone, streamed from his slingbox, on a cruise ship.<br>
<br>
Do you have real-time access to the running total of your usage to the
nearest kB? The Verizon people we've talked to act like it takes 24
hours to update.<br>
<br>
Even so there is a difficult inventory control challenge to make sure
that system XXXXX, which might have 3G modem YYYYY, gets the memo from
central-command that it should start throttling back its network
usage. I'm trying to avoid saving the state on a central server
because it'll use bandwidth which a) costs money and b) puts us closer
to the bandwidth cap. Some telemetry is necessary so if this turns out
to be unavoidable then that's what I'd do.<br>
<br>
It would be nice if the 3G modems would do this for us on their own,
but they don't.<br>
<br>
I like Dan Kulinski's idea of using iptables with "iptables-save -c" to
save the state and counters, and it looks like that would make the data
persist across a reboot.<br>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
Jim<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ockers@ockers.net">ockers@ockers.net</a>)
Contact info: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ockers.net/msi.html">http://www.ockers.net/msi.html</a>
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