Quotas on Gargoyle Router

July 20, 2012 Chilling_Silence How-To's / Guides / Tech info

Yuss, it’s everybody’s fav router firmware, and quite possibly one of the features it’s most famous for!

Per-device quotas provide you with the same functionality that your ISP has in terms of rate-limiting, as well as completely cutting access. On top of that, you can set unique ones for each device (Or person in your house).

What’s more, you get full control over how often it resets, such as weekly, daily, monthly, and when it resets. This means you can make it coincide with your ISP’s traffic data cap too!

Unfortunately it’s not without its short-comings. Here’s a few things you can do to help prevent the system being abused.

The way that the quotas work is based off the MAC Address of the system.

This means that if you’re going to give everybody 2GB a week, and you have a laptop, you can have a theoretical maximum of 4GB if you use your 2GB through your Wireless network card on your laptop, and another 2GB if you use the cabled network card on your laptop.

For most people / places / families, this isn’t an issue. People don’t generally plug in a laptop to a router where WiFi is available, nor do Desktops that are hard-cabled also connect via WiFi. It’s a “one or the other” for the most part, but it’s just something you should keep in mind.

Now in the Gargoyle Router you’re going to want to go to Connection –> DHCP.

You’ll see an option for “Block MAC addresses assigned a static IP that connect from a different IP” which you pretty much MUST have ticked:

 

This is going to prevent anybody on your LAN who thinks they can be clever and simply assign themselves a new static IP address and get a new quota. If you don’t do this, it’s easy enough to just change your IP address to something different and get yourself a new quota. Or, even worse, you can use the quota of another person.  With kids being so clever these days, I’ve actually seen that happen, one sibbling deliberately use the quota of another.

It’s still possible to change your MAC address if you’re really clever enough, however that’s generally a lot more effort than setting a new IP address. On top of that, most of the people I know who are clever enough to change the IP address of their device aren’t clever enough to change its MAC address. It’s certainly something to keep in mind, however. There is little you can do to stop that.

Now you’ve covered yourself comes the part where we actually set the quotas themselves.

Go to Firewall –> Quotas

In this example we’re going to give everybody on the network the same limit, so we’re going to select:

Applies to: All individual hosts without explicit quotas

This means that everybody is going to get the same quota by default, regardless of if it’s a phone, tablet, iPod, PC, laptop, or console. This is not a “shared” quota, but an individual per-device quota:

 

You can specify the Max Upload / Max Download if you want, however most people will find those two options irrelevant and move on to the next which is the Max Total Up+Down.

In this example we’re going to assign a maximum of 2GB per-device. Change the drop-down from Unlimited to “Limit to” and then enter 2 in the right-hand column. Change it from Megabyte to Gigabyte:

 

In this instance we’re going to reset the quota every week, but you can do it daily, monthly or even hourly!

So, change the “Max Total Up+Down” to “every week”.

I’m also going to set this up to prioritize the fact there will be kids at home doing homework during the week, so we’re going to reset it at 3AM on a Monday AM to give them the whole school-week with a fresh quota, and whatever they have left on the weekend to play games, they have left. If they use it all on school, then good on them.

 

You may or may not find it more useful to reset it, say Friday AM in order to give them a fresh start before the weekend? The sky is the limit.

Next in the list is when it is active. If you’re with an ISP that gives you free off-peak hours, you can configure it here if you want. Most don’t though, so we’re just going to skip over it for now.

Finally, you can choose between cutting all internet access, and simply throttling them back to a slower speed. To be honest in my experience it’s easiest to simply block them entirely. When they exceed their usage limit, they’ll be redirected to the routers login page which will show them just how much they’ve used. If you want to throttle them, you’ll need to pre-configure a few different QoS classes (Upload and download) beforehand.

Click on the “Add new quota” button and it will save your work, displaying it down the bottom:

 

Now let’s say you want to make yourself exempt (Because you’re the admin, why not?) simply click on the first drop-down menu and change it to:

“Only the following hosts”

Enter in your IP address and then follow the rest of the steps to give yourself a bigger quota. In this example, lets say you’re with Orcon and your monthly allowance resets on the 23rd. Simply go down the list, set it to monthly reset on the 23rd, give yourself a nice big quota of say 100GB and add that too:

 

Because you have your own quota defined, it’s going to take precedence over the “rest of them”.

Don’t forget to hit the Save Changes button, and you’re good to go, your quotas are now live and active!

On top of that, you and anybody else can check how much their current device has used by going to the IP Address of the router, and it will show it just underneath the login box (This means you DONT have to tell them the password).

Finally, one more word of warning: If you lose power, your quotas reset.

For this reason you should have the router on a UPS, and potentially locked somewhere semi-safe. Either that or make dire consequences if it’s restarted (It’s easy enough to give one or two users an incredibly tiny daily cap as punishment).

The rest is up to your imagination!!

I trust you’ve found this useful. If you have, please leave a comment and just say hi, or if you have any questions then feel free to ask!

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