Bandwith rationing
 

ok i have several computers on my LAN an i was wondering if thire is a way with a combunation of hardware/software to limit bandwith usage on said computers. way i see it if i am paying for the broadband i should have the lions share of bandwith.


thnx

A linux router can do this kind of thing, but can be trick to set up. Check out http://lartc.org/howto/ and http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ . A properly configured linux router can shape traffic quite well. any old pentium or 486 will do, with 16 MB ram. Please note, this is NOT trivial to set up. You're going to have to learn a bit to make it work.

There's a piece of windows software called netlimiter that allows you to limit download and upload traffic through your computer. If you could set up an old computer with 2 LAN cards (one to your lan router and one to the internet) you could limit speed but not total traffic to your buddie's computers. Not saying it's an elegant or a great solution but maybe easier to set up than a linux router.

Linux routers can be a pain to set up. It does not look like netlimiter will do what cheese wants. It appears to be for shaping local traffic only.

Um.... I think I would be the "several computers" on cheese's LAN... And I pay half the bill, so I am not sure where this is going, but I don't think It'll be anywhere good.

Cheese, you bastard, my buddy, it's not nice not to share...

Do you guys have a router already?

If you are just using a hub, then I understand the bandwidth problem, but a router automatically reassigns bandwidth according to demand, so unless NoSoup is alwas downloading, it shouldn't be a problem.

What do you mean by "several" computers? Are we talking 5 or 500 hundred? If you have 5 go pick yourself up a router from Best Buy for about 30-50 and that is it. Unless you two are constantly downloading pr0n or something you won't noticed the small slowdown of two people sharing the Internet connection(I still got about 300K with my cable). If you have 500 computers you are in for more work, I hope it was 5.

Gariig

Cisco routers can do this using the traffic shaping function. This only works with newer IOS' and there are some restrictions on the line type being traffic shaped. e.g. you cannot traffic shape a dial up line. However, you could do something like this:

LAN <--> Cisco E0 | Cisco E1 <--> DSL/Cable Modem