And this is where it would be really neat to have a feature that addresses this.
In IPFire, input your internet metering start and stop date, then put in your monthly bandwidth limit. IPFire monitors usage. If it detects you are on your way to exceeding your monthly bandwidth, it gradually starts to slow bandwidth down both ways. The closer you get to going over your limit, the more it restricts bandwidth until it cuts it off completely (user configurable). Maybe it’s a dumb idea, or is not doable, but if it is doable, I would happily contribute money to make it happen.
Edit: perhaps a better idea, it divides the monthly bandwidth by the number of days in the billing cycle, then cuts off usage if you exceed your daily limit (again, user configurable). You would have the option of saying NO and allowing downloads to continue for that day. The closer you get to your end-of-month, IPFire recalcs your daily allowance. If you’ve been overusing, it goes down; if you’ve been using less, then your daily allowance goes up.
@bloater99 your second paragraph can suit better some user cases, but not all. I mean… Sometimes I pile updates and downloads that can be deferred while I have to manage the “monthly quota” of internet usage. Close to the end I simply fire up the “download manager” try to avoid wasting my resultant quota (not “contaminating” the next period of quota/cap).
As stated for perl, there’s more than one way to do that.
As Davide Bianchi repeated countless times: one size fits only… one.
As an ISP here in New Zealand, I use or should I say try to use the proxy Accounting.
I have commented several times over the years that this module I find inaccurate and very frustrating in that it will not show the previous months usage for current connections. It shows the current month and 2,3,4 etc months previous but not the previous month.
So yes some easier way to account for usage is very high on my request list.