Re: Usage Monitoring and Bandwidth Allowance

[Marc Herbert <Marc Herbert gmail com>]

>> The second idea I imagine is a little bit harder, but I hope you can see
>> where I am going with it. Applications could be given percentage shares
>> of the current network bandwidth, and/or minimum allowances. This would
>> allow users to download at the same time as surfing as the download
>> could be configured to just use the spare bandwidth. 
> 
> Yes, this is getting more into iptables though.  At this point i
> honestly don't know much about bandwidth prioritization and iptables, so
> if somebody wants to pick this up and run with it, that would be great.

This is actually not a job for iptables but for tc. It's all explained
there:

  http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.qdisc.html

Note that you can only shape the traffic you send; you cannot prevent
people from sending you packets at the IP level. On the other hand
shaping incoming traffic is trivial at the TCP level, which is why all
peer to peer and other bandwidth-hungry applications have traffic
shaping already implemented.

Traffic shaping is definitely not specific to NetworkManager; if a
high-level, OS-wide user interface was to be designed then it should
be as independent from NetworkManager as possible. The fact that such
a user interface does not exist tells something: it is sooo much easier
to implement traffic shaping inside every application rather than
across the whole operating system. And it is good enough. You can find
this a pity but it is because of the fundamentally stateless way IP is
designed.

Cheers,

Marc