Limiting internet bandwidth?

[maniac]

I've put this in general, because it's not to do with the schools system, but some advise to help me tackle a problem in the house I live in.

 

We have a shared internet connection of 2mb, shared between 4 of us. We all pay equally for this, although it is in my name, but that's beside the point. We all download using torrent, and various other means, which creates a problem, as torrent systems are incredibly good at using bandwitch, which means if one of us is downloading, it effectively locks the rest of us out from doing much using the connection.

 

Fine, limit the downloading using the torrent client you might say. All very well and good, except one person in the house thinks he's a little bit above us all, and won't do this, hence locking the rest of us out from doing anything meaningful with the connection while he's downloading, which is most of the time! I would just cut his internet off, as it is in my name, but that would create a rift in the house, which tbh I don't want to do if I can help it.

 

What I want to do is some how limit his connection so he can only use 500kbs download, and 60kbs upload, which is roughly 1/4 of our available bandwidth. I don't mind if the solution is a software solution or a hardware solution, I just want to limit his internet useage to only using a 1/4 of the available bandwidth so the rest of us can carry on using it when he decides he wants to download something! Is there a cheap, reliable and easy way of doing this?? I'm sure someone somewhere must make a router with this sort of technology built in!

 

Cheers,

 

Mike.

[Midget]

You can do this with an IPCop Router.

 

We had an IPCop router and a central server used for all FTP, DCC+ and BT traffic that was controlled via a custom website (house of ComSc students)

[Geoff]

Yep, it's a standard feature in Linux (assuming it's compiled into the kernel and you install the user space tools). Even my OpenWRT based router can do traffic shaping.

[maniac]

Never played with linux before, although it's on my 'list' of things to start learning about this year. Looks like this may be a good excuse to start.

 

Thanks for the help guys,

 

Mike.

[Ric_]

@maniac: IPCop will take about 10mins to install on an old box (probably quicker than the download on your network ) - then follow the instructions at http://www.ipcop.org/1.4.0/en/admin/html/services.html#services_shaping regarding traffic shaping

[tom_newton]

FYI, SmoothWall Express has this feature in the latest beta (or the one about to be released) - we're trying to make traffic management "simple" for home users.

[Midget]

I only recommend IPCop because that is what I have used in the past (as smoothwall wasn't free)

[tom_newton]

Midget: SmoothWall Express has always, and always will be Free in all senses of the word. We do sell commercially supported for-profit solutions, but these have naught but positive impact upon express (paying for code-time mainly!).

 

Having said that - there may well be a subscription supported add-on for express in the near future, but this will NOT compromise the integrity of the core product.

 

Sorry, rant over

 

Tom

[Midget]

This was 5years ago and I hadn't seen smoothwall express, hence i went to IPCop which is an offshoot of smoothwall

[tom_newton]

Yeah, the IPCop crowd forked smoothie when we started offering commercial stuff - they thought we were going to go evil - we didn't - but at least now there's more choice.

[renegade]

We used to use Netlimiter to solve your problem, it gives you control over upload/download bandwidth between different programs as well as each machine. You can then split the total bandwidth 4 ways, then if you're using a torrent client you can give it x amount ul/dl , so it doesn't hog all of your chunk, leaving yourself plenty of bandwidth for browsing.

 

You can get a demo at http://www.netlimiter.com/

[Joedetic]

An alternative to Smoothwall or IPCop would be to use pfSense. I know there's a traffic shaping module/plugin for that. I have a feeling m0n0wall does it too. pfSense and m0n0wall aren't linux based but FreeBSD based. Mostly configured by a web interface in the same manner as many FOSS solutions to routing and firewalling.

[bizzel]

The Hertfordshire Grid limits us during the day. We have a 10 meg line that we can only push 1.3 meg down during the day. We're pretty sure it's not a problem on our end (if it was our pipe limiting us, we'd be maxing it out at 10 meg, non?) and suspect it's the Grid proxies that can't handle the load.

[gwendes]

The simple way is using one of the open firmwares - if your router can do this... cheaper, easier on the electricty bill and no problems to setup...

 

OpenWrt / Traffic shaping QOS howto

[gwendes]

The Hertfordshire Grid limits us during the day. We have a 10 meg line that we can only push 1.3 meg down during the day. We're pretty sure it's not a problem on our end (if it was our pipe limiting us, we'd be maxing it out at 10 meg, non?) and suspect it's the Grid proxies that can't handle the load.

 

Just to check as this sounds dangerously close to the limits if you're not clear on the difference between 'B' and 'b'. 1.2/3MB is the max speed you'll get from a 10Mb connection...

 

Sorry if you understood this... you probably do...

[dancingdruid]

I've traffic shaped with dd-wrt but perhaps there is no need for traffic shaping - just share a torrentbox (torrentflux, utorrent etc with a web interface). Something like this could have its own bandwidth limit and some torrent progs like torrentflux allow user accounts etc so you can share out the bandwidth this way.