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Question:
What is the Quota Feature in the profiles?
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This is NOT a bandwidth feature.
What is the Quota Feature used for?
Quota feature lets users visit specified sites for a defined time period – This filtering profile component (accessible via the Category Profile page) lets the administrator specify a set number of minutes/hits in which an end user can access a library category or category group before receiving a warning message or quota block page. If a specified number of minutes is defined for the Overall Quota, the end user can only spend that maximum amount of time at all quota-marked libraries/categories before being blocked from accessing URLs in any quota-marked library/category. If the end user is blocked from Internet access via the quota feature, he/she will need to wait until the quota is reset before accessing any Internet content.
This feature affects the following areas of the interface:
The Quota Settings window (System > Quota Settings) lets a global administrator specify the number of seconds that constitute a hit. This setting, along with the minutes specified in the quota, determine when the quota time has maxed-out and the user will be blocked from further access to URLs in that category, until the quota is reset. This window also lets the global administrator reset all quotas on demand, or set up a schedule for automatically resetting all quotas.
Please note, the quota time defined will relate to the actual time browsing on a site in a given category. The quote time is not based on clock time, but on the number of hits (as defined in seconds).
For example:
Let's assume that you have a quota of 60 minutes set up for the Sports library category and you have defined each hit to be equal to 10 seconds (default setting).
When a user goes to a site categorized under Sports, their initial landing of the site will equal its first hit and 10 seconds will be applied towards the quota. As the user proceeds to click links on this sports site, each click will remove 10 more seconds from the quota.
If the user walks away from the browser, and leaves the page open without any activity for 60 mins, no additional hits will apply to his quota due to the inactivity.
Of course, there are some sites that force client browsers to request updates regularly -- each of these requests would register as another hit. A hit will basically be triggered anytime there is a request from the client browser -- whether it's user initiated or browser initiated. If a user is browsing to a site that 'updates' its content on a regular basis (every minute, for example), the scripting on this site initiates additional requests to the web server -- and this behavior would qualify as a hit.
However, it is important to note that it is not possible to generate more than one minutes worth of traffic in any given minute. For example, if a user’s visits a sports site 25 times in one minute, even though they would accrue 10 seconds per hit the R3000 will only accumulate a total of 60 seconds total per minute to ensure that the user truly gets the 60 minutes their quota offers.
Overall Quota
Example: internet radio= 10 min shopping=25 min
But you set 10 min overall quota, 10 min will take precedence, it's imposible to control which categories the user will use the most.
Each LDAP, IPgroup or individual profile is setup separately.
- This article was previously published as:
- 8e6 KB 292279
