Need to regulate bandwidth, please help.

[ScottyB]

I have a Netgear RP614 router and I was wondering if any one knows a way to regulate how much bandwidth each computer hooked up to it gets?

 

[gaidin123]

Nope. There's no way. Almost no consumer level routers have any features that will let you control the bandwidth either in to or out of them.

Is there a FAQ for this kind of thing yet? It seems to get asked on a very regular basis.

You have 2 real options to control the bandwidth on your network if the specific application in question has no bandwidth control built in. First, you can use a linux box as a router and make use of the QoS software on it. Check out www.lartc.org for the howto. It's heavy duty stuff but there are cookbook solutions available now that can make the process of controlling your bandwidth a lot easier for simple cases. This is what I use at home.

The other option is to buy a professional router/switch that has QoS capabilities built in. I'm unfortunately not too familiar with affordable ones. Most any one with QoS will probably be way overkill in every other way and will cost quite a lot more than consumer routers.

There are some hacks that you can do to the Windows TCP stack and parameters that you can change to make it much less efficient (ie use less overall bandwidth) but I wouldn't recommend them.

Gaidin

 

[ScottyB]

hehe, oh well. I just wanted to slow done my roomates connection when I need more bandwidth

 

[gaidin123]

I understand the feeling. When I could barely ssh in to home because of my roomates not knowing or remember to cap their kazaa upstream I learned how to do that real quick in linux.

Gaidin

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: gaidin123
I understand the feeling. When I could barely ssh in to home because of my roomates not knowing or remember to cap their kazaa upstream I learned how to do that real quick in linux.

Gaidin

LOL, I know the feeling...when my dad starts streaming audio and stuff over my dialup connection, my speeds go to crap really quickly. :|

I guess getting cable would be a good alternative, but my parents don't feel it's worth the extra $30 per month that it costs over dialup.

 

[SiberianTiger]

ok...i want to resurrect this post. here's my case:

router: linksys 4-port router
older bro...winXP P3 933
me...win2k P3 933
younger bro...win2k celly2 633

issue:
when my older bro and i play counterstrike simultaneously, it's fine. pings are around 50-120
but once my younger bro starts surfing forums and shiet, we ping easily to over 1000+, effectively stopping movement in CS

so...we tried an experiment. my older bro goes to play CS while i surf the same sites as my yournger bro. we find that i increase his ping to about 250 max, which is still playable.

my question is why the heck does my younger bro lag us so badly?

 

[Coldfusion]

make sure you're all set to the same speed/duplex settings.

 

[Oaf357]

Kazaa, Instant Messengers, Microsoft's Automatic Update, etc.

A lot of these things can make the overhead on your network soar.

Check the duplex/speed settings on all PCs, get the latest drivers and if that doesn't work get Ethereal going. If you see packets from him your router/switch combo isn't switching (this isn't likely though). But I would ask this question what kind of bandwidth do you get when no one is on?

 

[SiberianTiger]

oh...interesting...how do you check the duplex/speed thing? i should look into that first

 

[gunrunnerjohn]

If I own the router, I just password the setup, when I need bandwidth, I turn off the other computer's access!

 

[SiberianTiger]

haha...and then my brothers will kill me.

 

[Goosemaster]

Try astaro.org's astaro Security Linux.


I will try it soon myself. It has a lot of QoS(quality of service) options that let you limit a numerical amount of bandwidthD) per IP


I need to set it up at home.....five of us sahre a DSL line....one of us could easily tkae down a T3 if we wanted too...so we have to regulate it.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Goosemaster
Try astaro.org's astaro Security Linux.

I will try it soon myself. It has a lot of QoS(quality of service) options that let you limit a numerical amount of bandwidthD) per IP

I need to set it up at home.....five of us sahre a DSL line....one of us could easily tkae down a T3 if we wanted too...so we have to regulate it.

Hmm, I don't like the proprietary nature of such a thing, and from looking on their forums I saw something about it not letting you have more than 10 IPs without getting a commercial license. If that's true, I'd much rather go to the extra trouble to read the kernel docs, recompile the kernel, and set up QoS stuff myself.

OTOH, is there software in OpenBSD that would do this?