Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I wanted to host for my brother the latest WoW patch, but at a hefty 450 MB, I didn’t want to blow all my bandwidth on it either. I am setting a limit for the download at 2.5 TB of bandwidth, and limiting it to 5mbs at 10 connections a second. My hardware is RHEL 4 running on a P4 with Plesk 8. In the guide to follow, you’ll see a few steps that wouldn’t be needed on a non-plesk system. To setup bandwidth limiting for the host, we need to be able to compile a new apache module against our system, and then install and configure it.

Step 1: The prereqs

First I needed to setup a yum repository for FC4. This can be accomplished by issuing an RPM command:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-4.rpm

Now that you can access the RPM packages, we need to install http-devel using yum:

yum install httpd-devel

If all went well, we can now extract, compile, and install mod_cband for apache:

cd /tmp
wget http://cband.linux.pl/download/mod-cband-0.9.7.4.tgz
tar xzvf mod-cband-0.9.7.4.tgz
cd mod-cband-0.9.7.4
./configure
make
make install

If all went well, restart apache with the new module (you can check httpd.conf to make sure the module is going to be loaded):

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Step 2: Configuration

Here’s where the Plesk part gets annoying. We can’t just edit our vhosts file, because plesk writes over it all the time. Instead, we edit a /home/httpd/vhosts/*/subdomains/*/conf/vhost.conf file. Mine looks like this:

CBandScoreboard /var/www/scoreboard
CBandPeriod 4W
CBandDefaultExceededCode 509
CBandLimit 2500G
CBandSpeed 5000 5 10
CBandRemoteSpeed 1600 3 1
<Location /cband-status>
  SetHandler cband-status
</Location>
<Location /cband-status-me>
  SetHandler cband-status-me
</Location>

What does this mean? (1) Use /var/www/scoreboard to log usage and limits (2) Reset the limit count every 4 weeks (3) Throw a 509 error when the limits are exceeded (4) Allow 2.5TB per period (5) Allow 5mbs with 5 requests a second and 10 connections at a time oeverall (6) Allow 1.6mbs with 3 requests a second and 1 connections at a time per client (7) Allow us to access a page at /cband-status to view the status.

You’ll also need to issue commands to make the scoreboard directory, and to allow apache to own it:

mkdir /var/www/scoreboard
chown apache:apache /var/www/scoreboard

Finally, Plesk requires you to inform it of your work:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=yourdomain.com

If you restart Apache now, everything should work!

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Step 3: An Example

You can take a peek at my status page right now if you’d like. It looks a bit like this:

Update: Fixed a little formatting.

2 Responses to 'Bandwidth & Connections Limiting: A How To Guide'

1. Will said:

   on August 30th, 2006 at 4:18 pm

   that little ‘reset’ link on your stats page resets the bandwidth limits. Your 2500mb/mo limit keeps getting reset.

   Just FYI…

2. abbasi said:

   on July 30th, 2008 at 8:34 am

   thank you
   please tell me how can i disable or uninstall cband module?

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