Not necessary to use that many adapters, It can easily be done on 2, one for the internet and one for the LAN.
Linux can run multiple IPs on a single adapter by using aliases in the config, and then using the traffic shaper utils you can set bandwidth for each.
The only real problem will come in if they decide to snoop and since with this method they would all be on the same physical network they might find the other machines.
You could thus use 192.168.2.X for one, 192.168.3.X for another, etc.
Snooping is not really a problem. Two of the four tenants are companies owned by my family, the third is my own company, and the fourth is owned by three of my friends. And no one really has any technical talent. :-) The issue really is that a 512 Kbps Internet connection is going to cost upwards of $600 per month and people are going to be paying for a service level, so they should get their fair share. Besides, as Ben pointed out, snooping is mostly eliminated at the switch anyway.
My lack of understanding here is in the assignation of the IP addresses for the client. It sounds to me like four virtual adapters on one real Ethernet card will look the same to the DHCP server, so one cannot assign different subnets to different tenants unless they really are on separate interfaces. But now that I think about it (and after checking out the dhcpd.conf man page briefly) I cannot see how to specifically assign the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet to eth1 (or eth0:1) anyway... maybe I'd actually have to run four dhcpd processes, each listening on a single interface?
There must be a simpler way... I'm sure I'm missing something here.
4. Optional: Provide each tenant with an FTP-served directory on the server which can *only* be accessed from their network. So if they pull down the confidential something or their wife's nude pictures, other tenants cannot get at that information.
provide each user/client with an ftp directory they can log into as a user. by default vsftp provides a chroot jail for them.
Excellent. Thanks!
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
