Our network has a mixture of different types of users, including wireless connections from the staff housing on campus.

At the moment some of the staff kids are on vacation from college and are clogging up our 128/64 kbit/s VSAT link during the day. During the night I don't care what they do.

Is it possible to configure our MikroTik to limit bandwidth usage on a per-user basis and to vary (or remove) the limit depending on the time of day?

Ideally I'd want to do this based on the profile the user belongs to, for example 'staff' users have unrestricted bandwidth at all times but 'residence' users are restricted to 5 kbit/s from 8-7 on weekdays.

I'm thinking I could do non-varying limits by using profile packet marks and limiting packets with those marks in the queues. Are profile packet marks applied before or after firewall mangle rules packet marks?

Kevin

OT: You know that 5kbit are only 625byte/s ... even a GPRS connection is
faster?!! Do you think of 5kbit per user or do you want to share it among all?

seandsl
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Kevin, yes that is possible - simple queues have time setting, just make one queue for day and say that time will be 7:00-20:00, and for the rest of the time there will be no limit. if you wish to use this limit per user, not per all users - use PCQ. see manual

but yes, 5Kbits is very slow speed, i even wonder that anything works there. I remember something like 10 years ago when we had ISA modems, even they were 28Kbits and it was horribly slow.

OT: You know that 5kbit are only 625byte/s ... even a GPRS connection is
faster?!! Do you think of 5kbit per user or do you want to share it among all?

It is a little bit slow, just the first number that popped into my head. If they keep accessing the kind of sites (porn, mostly) that they are just now they'll be getting zero!

Kevin

How about 64Kbits, same performance as a 56k modem operation FLEX. Useable for internet but not hogging to the available bandwidth

How about 64Kbits, same performance as a 56k modem operation FLEX. Useable for internet but not hogging to the available bandwidth

64Kbit/s is half of our bandwidth, so the per-user limit would need to be set lower than that. Or maybe I can just have all the 'residence' users sharing 32 Kbit/s between them.

Our problem is that we have too many users on a low-bandwidth, high-latency link.

OK, I've been looking through the manual and trying to get a better understanding of queues.

So I think I should be able to add a packet mark for each hotspot user profile, for example our staff quarters users (profile 'residence') would have their packets marked differently from staff in their offices (profile 'staff').

I could then set up a simple queues to handle 'residence' packets during working hours (Mon-Fri 0800-1800) with a bandwidth limit.

I'm not sure how this would affect our existing bandwidth-sharing queue tree: Also, will it do any good to restrict download (coming in over the satellite link) speeds at the router? Those packets are being sent by the far-end router, so I'm assuming I have no control over what rate they send them at or how they prioritise them (if at all). Dropping the packets in a queue will just lead to retries and possibly make the situation worse. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?