LARTC - Nov 2002 - lartc/dhcpd/iptables .. possibly another open source project

I''m working on a web interface and some back end programs to
coordinate the actions between a dhcpd server, an iptables mac filtering
firewall, and most of all the lartc project.  Right now the code is very
rough and is about a month old with a lot of other projects, school, and
stuff sidetracking me from moving fast.  I''d like to know if anyone
would
be interested in working on this project if I were to upload it to
sourceforge or a similar location.  The project idea is a single box to
manage the customers of our wisp service or any other isp or network for
that matter. Everytime I start working on a function, I think of 10 other
things I need the box to do.  Right now I''m the sole developer and  all
current code is in C/HTML.  If you can''t tell I''m getting
pretty bogged
and would love to share the fun.  Some of the functionality I hope to
achieve is listed below.  


1.  web interface for wisp or isp customer account management, traffic
shaping.

2.  Glue to control the dhcp server by modifying and parsing the
dhcpd.conf for fixed ip''s.  I''m working on an intelligent
mechanism for going through the leases file to determine customer''s
ip''s
based off of their mac and update traffic filters based off of ip changes
due to lease expirations by doing mac comparisons.

3. Glue to seamlessly operate the iptables firewall.

4. A cool thing for an isp or this project to have would be a customer
login to a web interface so intelligent people can more specifically shape
their bandwidth.

5. Some pretty bandwidth reports with a breakdown by customer information 
and eventually some snmp stuff with mrtg or similar to monitor our
individual access points/routers usage and load

6.  A client/server socket program to send diagnostic information from
proc on the access points or computers, to the web interface for
troubleshooting and more data.

As rough as it may be, I''ve got a lot of this stuff working already.
Has someone made a stats program to periodically check the qdisc and class 
stats for reporting, bandwidth breakdown, and such.  If nothing has
already been developed I plan on scraping the stats in c and dumping them
into a sql environment for use with a graph application.  I think rrdtool
is a nice graphing utility to fit the bill.   What do you think?

The freaking traffic shaping still has me stumped a little bit.  If I want
to limit traffic by tos as well as by bandwidth on a customer basis.
Initially I thought I coudl make a prio and hang htb''s off of it but
this
way requires a class for each user on each band for the tos as well as
another class above the prio so a user can''t go over their allotted
bandwidth.  If this sounds silly, I''m confused as to how to limit the
bandwidth on a per user basis when the traffic comes off of the leaf in a 
prio.  If a user has 128kbit shaping, Do I have to put a class on all
three leaves for that customer as well or can all three leaves connect to
one class.  I tried to get this to work but I dont'' think it''s
possible.
The latest idea for the shaping I''m working on, is to place a htb qdisc
at
the top and assign a class for every user and set their bandwidth limit
there.  Under each user''s htb class,  I place a prio qdisc for doing
user based tos shaping with 3 more classes for each user underneath that?
Will this work.  I''ve coded a number of attempts to automate this but
don''t have the prio in place.  

Please let me know if you''re interested in working on the open source
project I''ve mentioned above.  If there''s something out there
that will
keep me from writing some of the stuff and take a bit of the load off my
plate, please let me know.  I''ll be eternally grateful. 

     

Hayden Myers	
Support Manager
Skyline Network Technologies	
hayden@spinbox.com
(410)583-1337 option 2




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Hello,

On Wed, 13 Nov 2002 17:17:08 -0500 (EST), Hayden Myers
<hayden@spinbox.com> wrote:
> 	I''m working on a web interface and some back end programs to
> coordinate the actions between a dhcpd server, an iptables mac
> filtering firewall, and most of all the lartc project.  Right now the
> code is very rough and is about a month old with a lot of other
> projects, school, and stuff sidetracking me from moving fast.  I''d
> like to know if anyone would be interested in working on this project
> if I were to upload it to sourceforge or a similar location.
We here have a university with a need of such tool and a couple of
possible developers, thus you can be quite sure about survivability of
the project, as I suppose that there are many such places around the
world and if you GPL your code, it will be developed further as long as
it is needed.

-- 
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius@debian.org
 #--------------------------------------------------------------#
 |     .''''`.                                                  
|
 |    : :'' :         Debian GNU/Linux    &         LAKA         |
 |    `. `''       http://www.debian.org     http://www.laka.lv  |
 |      `-                                                      |
 #--------------------------------------------------------------#

You might want to have a look at www.webmin.com it contains webinterfaces
for all kinds of daemons and configs, including dhcpd and itpables. It might
be easier and more worthwhile for you if you create a webmin plugin
(haven''t
tried it, but I reckon it''s easier than starting from scratch).

In any case, good luck with it and let us know how it''s coming along.

Jannes Faber


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