[squid-users] Volume quota management availablity

[Yoinier Hernandez Nieves]

2018-03-20 10:25 GMT-04:00, Amos Jeffries <squid3 at treenet.co.nz>:
> On 19/03/18 23:03, Anoop Sreedharan wrote:
>> Dear Team,
>> We have an IT environment catering to educational institute wherein we
>> have approx more than 1000 users accessing the internet.
>>
>> having a volume based internet subscription, we are in need to have a
>> solution wherein i need to restrict users to a certain volume of quota
>> per month and upon crossing that threshold, need to either stop their
>> access or throttle their bandwidth speed.
>>
>> following is the scenario. having an internet link of 50Mbps in my campus
>>
>> 1. users have to be authenticated via Active Directory  -- i.e. users in
>> a certain AD group should only get access to internet
>> 2. should be able to define a volume threshold ( e.g 100GB per group/per
>> user)
>> 3. upon exhaustion of the volume the user bandwidth should b throttled
>> to, say, 256Kbps. OR block internet access to that user completely.
>> 4. this volume calculation should be done for both HTTP and HTTPS based
>> session.
>> 5. should be able to generate a monthly report showcasing the volume
>> consumed by specific user during a specific time-frame by showing the
>> spread of the volume distributed within websites visited/downloaded from.
>>
>> Kindly help to suggest this could be possible with Squid.
>> I am open to using some log analytics mechanism like sarg or anything
>> similar for reporting.
>
> Quota is not a concept easily applied to HTTP messaging since it is a
> stateless protocol and operates in terms of entire messages - not
> packets or bytes. As such there is intentionally no mechanism to
> maintain statefulness between transactions for quota controls to use in
> Squid.
>
> There is also a rather lot of traffic details outside of HTTP an unknown
> to Squid which greatly affect the relationship between what Squid sees
> as bandwidth and what actually occurs "on wire". That all makes the OS
> networking stack a much better place to do such management.
>
> Most OS these days provide very capable tools for QoS bandwidth
> management. Squid provides configuration features to integrate with
> those, delivering packet TOS markings per-transaction or per-message for
> the machines OS systems to utilize in their QoS flow identification and
> accounting.
>
>
>
> Log analysis (eg SARG) and helpers are other possibilities that worked
> in the past ...
>
>  BUT these methods have always suffered from the problem of only
> accounting for traffic usage at the end of a completed HTTP transaction
> and authorizing users only at the beginning. The difference can see
> large amounts of over-usage and CONNECT tunnels are the worst-case
> scenario there as they may last for days/weeks with "infinite" amount of
> traffic usage meanwhile.
>
>  Added to those problems we now face most traffic being HTTPS ... which
> goes through proxies via CONNECT tunnels. So much for those ways of
> doing quotas.
>
>
> Amos
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>

You can use Squish, and project to count the squid quote navigation,
reading the log file.

Here the URL

www.mcgill.org.za/software/squish/

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