Throttle Broadband Bandwidth on 'Greedy' machine

Do be honest downloading is not really what slows an internet connection down across a network. It is the opposite that hurts more that is uploading.

If one person is using p2p software that would have more impact on your network because if your upload bandwidth is maxed out that leaves no room for ACK data and this would significantly slow down your incoming bandwidth. This would have the effect of really slow web browsing, slow to receive emails, internet vidoe streaming would stutter etc.

If you setup a router with Quality of Service that would solve the above problem.

Otherwise look into installing carrafix on this users mac, this will throttle both his incoming and outgoing bandwidth however he could overide those settings.

You could setup your server as router and route all your internet through it that would make traffic shaping easier.

What kind of router do you have?

BTW you can get 8mb or 22mb connections these days for about £25 a month.

If he's p2p-ing then he's almost certainly uploading as well (particularly if he's using bittorrent). It is the u/l component of that that kills internet browsing.

The cheapest solution (i.e. free) is to have him open his p2p client and dial down the u/l speed (and maybe the d/l speed as well). If you're running BT and throttle back u/l to 80% capacity then you will actually enhance your d/l speed b/c you're no longer inhibiting connection with other clients so it might help both of you.

You could make sure the ports his p2p app is using are closed. Some routers even let you set up allowed time for specific machine on the network.

Since this is work, and p2p is not work related, I would just tell him to stop or go find another job! ahah

I'm not sure if our router is good enough to configure in that way (I think it's a Speedtouch 510). Does anyone know? We do have a server (OS X Server 10.4.5). Can this do anything in terms of throttling, or blocking ports/IP addresses?

The speedtouch 510 is not the most user friendly of devices to configure and as far as I know does not support Quality of Service.

OSX server can do throttling and block ports etc.

You would have to use your server as a router/firewall you would have setup your speedtouch router as a bridge. You ideally would have a second network interface installed. The second interface would connect to a network switch.

Then you would need to configure the DHCP server and the firewall . The setup is way beyond the scope of this thread. Unless your prepared to spend some time learning to be server admin you would have to employ someone to come in and set this up.

Or on the other hand you could just replace your speedtouch 510 with something more sophisticated.

I set up one of these for a client last night. I was amazed that a £30 box boasted features such as stateful firewall and Quality of Service. So you could get a 4 port adsl router that suppored QoS and had a stateful firewall and you would then have the tools to restrict your network.

It is important that though that whatever device you use must have a log so you can monitor things.

Apparently the Speedtouch 510 does support QOS and I've just downloaded a PDF all about it, but it's completely beyond me... I'm just a lowley designer, not a network administrator.

Ah yes I am just reading their CLI reference manual it has ATM quality of service but you do need a good understanding of their CLI synstax. Something I am not going to get into. I do not like alcatel/thompson products.

Whilst my colleague was out of the room earlier I quietly changed the settings in his P2P software - limited the number of servers it connects to, limited the number of concurrent downloads/uploads and limited the upload bandwidth to 10% of the available bandwidth.

If your outgoing connection is 256k that is about 32kbytes/sec If you had a global setting across your network that you only used 28kbytes/sec of your outgoing bandwidth this would allow enough room for ACK data on your network and thus not slow down your incoming connection.

Therefore if you had router that had an easy to use GUI to setin place global QoS rules then you would not need to configure your collegues torrent settings.

Is that an easy thing to do? Can this be set using the routers control panel?

I use a linksys wrt54gs (vers 1.1) with firmware from Sveasoft.

I can setup rules in the Web GUI to restrict access to certain services. look at the following screenshot.

Access Restrictions


And setting up QoS rules is easy see the following screenshot. Notice that you prioritise the individual ports on the router. Or by MAC address.

quality of service

Hmmm... I can't see anything like that in my router's
control panel.

I didn't expect to see that in your router config pages, your router does not support this functionality.
I was showing an example of what you could do if you got a router that had these type of functions.

There's IP Addresses, IP Routing, NAPT, DHCP, DNS
etc. But none of them seem to have anything to do
with QOS or access restrictions.

The QoS in your router is done at the ATM layer which is something completely different.

Maybe we will have to invest in a better router.

I think you will.

Just make sure you get one that boasts features such as SPI firewall Qos, System logging etc.