It’s been a while since my last post; I’ve been busy with my business’ new website zootzone.com. Now that the cosmetic changes of the new brand have been implemented, we’re ready to start introducing more technical enhancements to our service offerings. The most pressing item on the todo list is to automate sign-up and link payments to our merchant facility so that customers are charged to their credit cards.

Having recently moved into our new office premises, a few challenges have arisen. As before, we’re sharing a building with other businesses who also require Internet connectivity, so it makes financial sense to share access, be it a single line, or the bundling of several lines for redundancy. I’m building a bandwidth monitoring application, which will reside on a router, between the internal network and the gateway router; this will record bandwidth consumption per host associated with each business in the building. The system will record traffic associated with each connected host’s MAC address. There are several Linux and BSD based firewall and router options, but most are over-kill for the requirements, or don’t offer fine-grained traffic accounting. I’ll post more on the solution implemented at a later stage, but it is likely to include the use of Perl, BASH and iptables chains on a Linux system. This system will also be enhanced and used on our hosting platform to monitor customer bandwidth use.