What is it?

A little script that limits the number of downloads that a user can initiate via a transparent proxy to my home machine. If the user is downloading a file, and they already started a download in the past 2 minutes, then kill the old download.

This prevents my upstream caching proxy from flooding my home PC when users are clicking around previewing files, or Kodi is scanning, causing it to cache the entire file when they only really peeked at the first few bytes of it.

How does it work?

It uses tcpdump to intercept inbound TCP connections that start with GET, pulls out the HTTP headers and the user name, then uses tcpkill to kill old connections for that user.

That's horrible

Yes it is. Cool though isn't it? And it was a lot more fun than trying to write an nginx plugin.