What could I use to rate-limit certain internet content?

Question

Much as I would like to just ban access to FaceBook in my household, it'd be political suicide and just a bit obvious.

What I'd like to do is rate limit access to Facebook at certain times of the day so that it kinda works but is just such a pain in the ass to use that the kids go off and do something more productive like reading a book.

I'd prefer to do this at the router and have looked at dd-wrt but don't see how I could do this.

I'd be happy to consider replacing the router (a LinkSys BEFR41) with a Linux or Windows box (the domestic internet access is presented on an ethernet cable by our WiMax provider).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you want to go the PC route, I suggest using OpenBSD. It comes with a very nice packet filter called pf. You could use it as an Ethernet bridge (transparent) or replace your current Linksys device and do NAT with it.

The configuration and manipulation of your filter with pf is much easier than with Linux. OpenBSD provides many examples in the pf faq. You could set a script to execute via cron at certain times to assign a give portion of bandwidth to Facebook's IPs.

If you like to try new things, and want a lot of room to grow your ruleset this is the way to go.

Answer 2

With dd-wrt or a linux box you would use the tc command.