original poster here.

so basically as far as i know (there are a couple of people not in our
"appartment/student hostel" who i have only met for 2 mins), every one
is using WinXP home(came with their laptops, poor people), with myself
and another person using WinXP Pro(self built machines, both looking at
GenToo Linux).  Everyone has their own machine . - so basically who the
"user" is, is irrelevant to me.  In addition there is also a Fileserver
running Win2000(considering a Linux dib with sambo, but really not in a
hurry for that) sharing movies, tools, music and the like.

I'm really keen to avoid a proxy server, i like solutions to be
invisible to the user, but if squid supports invisiable proxy server
than that would be okay.  The catch is.  We have only 1 spare old
computer to use, where the primary goal is fair bandwidth sharing, which
monowall does nicely - but i guess it will all be dependant to monowall
allowing the installation of squid.  I'll looked into a plug in, but so
far haven't found it.

John . wrote:

"Much simpler to put in static MAC to IP mapping and firewall rules that
just count traffic for each IP. "

This is exactly what i want to do - So i've set up this rule.  (We've
already fixed who is using what IP in theory, but we haven't as yet tied
it into MAC addresses,  but that is on the list of TODOs)  - and then
how do i "extract" this information (traffic usage from the firewall
log) - since it is once per month, it doesn't have to have a graph or
anything (ofcourse that would be nice) - does it only store the last 50
entries from the logs? - or only display the last 50 entries? if so,
i've seen seen this enable "*Enable syslog'ing to remote syslog server"
*so i send that to another machine which is always on - what would be a
good program to display who is using the internet (over the last
min-day-month), unfortunatly the program has to support winblows.

thanks for all of your help

Martin
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