VOIP and ADSL broadband options

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Wannabe Geek

#68405 21-Sep-2010 12:58

I am from a residential Charitable Trust. We have several land lines and wired adsl broadband and about 20 computers linked in. I am trying to set up VOIP and broadband with capacity to see what each computer uses in terms of GB - may be for billing purposes.

I can find companies that do one or more but not all of the above. Can anyone help me - particularly for any software/ways to read GB usage.

sbiddle

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#382849 21-Sep-2010 19:29

I don't understand your questrion. Are you wanting to see how much data usage each PC on the ADSL connection uses?

Questioner

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Wannabe Geek

#383016 22-Sep-2010 08:55

Thanks for answering. 'YEs I am looking to see how much GB each computer uses per month.

sbiddle

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#383107 22-Sep-2010 11:58

You're either going to need to buy a router that can give you this sort of functionality (something simple like a Miktrotik can) or install software on each PC to log usage.

hagfish

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#391017 12-Oct-2010 16:35

You could set up a 'Bastion Host' which is a PC with two network ports, that sits between your broadband modem, and your network switch.

user -- switch --|
user -- switch --|
user -- switch --|-- Bastion host -- broadband modem -- Internet
user -- switch --|
user -- switch --|

The Bastion host can be a second line of defense, and metes out connectivity to the PCs on your network. I used to use MRTG, which would log data in the background, and had a Web front end. The machine doesn't need to be very powerful, but it does need to be super-reliable.

It would require quite a bit of messing about with firewalls - iptables etc - so there could be lots of learning to do, before you unleash it in a production environment :)

Ragnor

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#391025 12-Oct-2010 16:50

Yeah there are a number of ways of monitoring and controlling usage, pretty much they all boil down to putting in some form of gateway/proxy hardware.

What you go for will depend on your budget and tech savvy.

If you are tech savvy and cheap get a spare old pc with two network cards and install one of the linux or bsd solutions (pfsense, smoothwall, monowall, ipcop etc etc) and spend ages tweaking it.

If you're willing to pay for a managed service get something like a Sonicwall from a network services company who will support and configure it for you.

webwat

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#391262 13-Oct-2010 11:23

I think when I was playing with firewalls I found that monowall was best for this with an addon that tracks usage for each computer. pfSense is based on that system but has more features -- not sure if ipcop has such features yet but it did have a failover uplink.

Time to find a new industry!