Hey all,

My Dad's finishing some renovations this year and is thinking of getting some uni boarders next year and we got discussing internet connections.
What I'd like to put in is a firewall/ router box to share the internet connection (Telstra Cable). We figured out his needs are:
- privacy, each person cant see the others - (Easy, subnetting, filtering)
- logging, Telstra slows the connection to 28K at 10 Gig/month.
- rate shaping (QoS), when a person DLs 3 gig or so, their connection is slowed to make it fair on everyone else.
- easy monitoring - including personal accounting system for each boarder
- email notification of abuses/limits

I'm looking at something like Astaro or SmoothWall.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

I'm using ClarkConnect myself and I'm quite happy with it. I'm not sure of all the features at the moment, so I'm not sure if it will do everything you want...

Stig

Although it won't do what you're asking out of the box, I second the recommendation of ClarkConnect as a firewall. I use it at home and used it at work until the hardware died.

To acheive true privacy you'd need separate ethernet interfaces.
Clarkconnect does do squid logging i.e. web proxy only. But it does not do logging of all traffic.
CC doesn't do any sort of accounting/monitoring/notifications that you are asking for.
CC has the bpalogin client for Telstra broadband as an option which makes things easy.

CC is linux based though so it's possibly a good starting point but you'll need to put in a bit of work yourself to reach your goals.

BTW: Telstra slows to 64kbps after 10GB. Optus slows to 28kbps.

There might be a better suited distro, but when I was looking I tried almost everything. I used Smoothwall intially but it's just a basic firewall/router. It doesn't have any of servers like mail and web like ClarkConnect.

I really didn't like Astaro, SME, Mandrake firewall or any of the others I looked at or tried.