Re: Feature: quota control

Honestly, if I wanted to do byte-based quotas today, I'd have an
external ACL helper talking to an external logging helper; that way,
you can just log the response sizes to a daemon and then another
daemon would use that information to make a decision at access time.
The only even mildly hard part about this is sharing state between the
daemons, but if you don't need the decisions to be real-time, it's not
that bad (especially considering that in any serious deployment,
you'll have state issues between multiple boxes anyway).

Squid modifications that would help this (and similar use cases):
1) Allow multiple, different external loggers to be defined and used.
2) Harmonise the interfaces/configuration of *all* external helpers,
so that you can pass arbitrary args to each, using the same syntax.
I'm looking at you, redirectors.
3) Reduce the overhead of using external helpers, if possible.

A *lot* of the customisation that I do for Squid is based on uses of
helpers like this; they're actually very powerful and flexible, if you
know what you're doing with them. I would very much like to see Squid
turn them into more of a strength...

On 27/02/2009, at 9:30 AM, Robert Collins wrote:

> Key things I'd look for:
> - quota's shouldn't be lost when squid restarts
> - people should be able to use external quota systems (they may have
> e.g. netflow or other systems tracking direct b/w use, and squid
> is pulling from those allowances when downloads are caused by a
> given user).
>
> Both of which are nicely solved by Adrians suggestion of making sure
> there are appropriate hooks in squid to let other software actually do
> quotas.
>
> It would be nice to ship a default client for those hooks that does
> something simple (like monthly quotas with a simple script to report
> on
> current totals/reset). But even that is probably too much in core - it
> should probably be a parallel project, like the reference icap client
> is.
>
> (And isn't iCap enough to do quotas?, or is it too heavyweight?
> Perhaps
> look at the in-squid iCap-alike Alex has been working on?)
>
> -Rob

--
Mark Nottingham       mnot_at_yahoo-inc.com