The UoC rates are fairly reasonable, and a possible starting point for you.
http://www.it.canterbury.ac.nz/accounts.htm#mail%20charges Email and Internet traffic (both incoming and outgoing) International - 8c/MegaByte National - 1.5c/MegaByte Charging for disk allocation over a certain quota is quite a good way to stop people downloading lots of _crap_ because they know they'll be charged to keep it. Canterbury charges for email and disk storage over 10Mb. As far as the legal situation goes, maybe setup things in such a way that students aren't charged for internet access during class time. And either charge students a flat yearly fee or a per megabyte charge for email. Setup squid to remove advertising from websites if you havent already done so, this will reduce bandwidth dramatically. Setup squid to limit access so only certain filetypes are allowed through. If you limit the filetypes, you may find that your bandwidth drops. Staff downloading mp3s for example :) Sounds like interfacing with pcounter is going to be a problem, can you make pcounter interface with something external? ldap? mysql? Something you can easily write scripts for your squid logging to work with. If you havent already done so, work on reducing the amount of bandwidth used if you can. Increase the squid cache. Presuming that your bandwidth isnt equally spread around all the staff and students try and find the source. You may be able to bring your bandwidth down to below quota most months. This gives you more time to evaluate the more complicated charging and accounting options. Does your ISP have a proxy server running? Setup squid to talk to that proxy server if you can, lower your international traffic charges. Talk to your ISP maybe they'll be willing to help you get your proxy talking to theirs. Just some ideas... On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 01:40, CF wrote: > 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? -- Sascha Beaumont <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
