I've got a problem. According to various government and ministry circulars, schools cannot charge for internet access. Schools can charge for items that have a take-home component (ie, food for cooking class, or paper for printing) We're not allowed to disadvantage those who can't/won't pay for an item.
We routinely approch or exceed our monthly data cap, and incur penalty rates on the excess data. What I've been directed to figure out - how can we charge students for their internet traffic? (the legality of it I'll leave for the BOT.) The setup - a linux firewall doing NAT and load balancing on two cablemodems. Inside the network is one squid server running on linux. Theres also a NT4 domain controller running PCounter. Each student has a credit balance in pcounter's database. What I'm thinking, is a little log processing every night to trap user's usage, and debit their accounts. My questions: 1) How to interface with the pcounter database server running on windows server? 2) Should I be using IP Accounting, or processed squid logs? 3) What rates to charge? 4) Is there a better way to do it?
