I was wondering recently what the biggest bandwidth hogs were on my home network at a certain moment. On Linux I use iftop on the router for this, but I wonder in OpenBSD if, rather than install the iftop package, there's something different -- more OpenBSD-ish -- I should be doing with clients to pflow or whatever to achieve this same near-instanteous view of machines' Internet usage across the router (which NATs them from their LAN).
Lately I've been reading about CARP and discovering that the packet filter code has all kinds of cool stuff built in for transparent load-balancing and failover. And, I like the keep-state stuff that lets me do things like rate-limit ssh connections. So, I'm thinking that PF may offer me all manner of wonders. So, I got to thinking today: I wondered about my kids' use of YouTube and suchlike, and I wondered if there's a good way of using PF on the router to give them a weekly download limit, perhaps cumulative over their devices, after which it gets limited to a slow crawl or even cut off. Is this (or some variant thereof) something that PF makes easy (any pointers?), or is tricky but clearly described in the latest Book of PF, or just not worth the effort of attempting -- any thoughts? I may have just picked the wrong web search terms, or maybe this just isn't yet at all easy. (... and Happy New Year!) -- Mark
