P2P Traffic Shaping For Home Use?

An anonymous reader writes "My housemate uses an aggressive P2P client, that when in use makes the Internet unusable for everyone else connected to the network. After hearing about various ISPs shaping traffic to reduce P2P traffic, I was wondering if there was a solution for managing P2P traffic on a home network. I have a Linksys WRT54G available for hacking. Can Slashdot recommend a way to reduce the impact of P2P on my network and make it usable again?"

Comments

Just speak to him!

[drspliff]

My housemate has a machine setup for bittorrent, when we first moved in together it was very annoying as he seemed oblivious that running it all the time meant that my connections were slow, dropping all the time & unusable.

So I spoke to him, you know - in a rational way. It's now scheduled for the nights & days when we're either asleep or at work with a few hours in between & most of the weekends where it's either throttled down to 10k/s (by uTorrent) or stopped completely.

On top of that we've got a Smoothwall box with packet prioritization for ssh/web/email/im etc. but no bandwidth throttling.

At the end of the day, if you cant come to an agreement then it's probably just gonna get worse for you two and there's nothing you can do to stop him being an asshole.

Re:Just speak to him!

[Omnifarious]

I had a housemate who ran P2P software all the time without even realizing it. Talking to him did nothing. Limiting the number of outbound packets from his computer to a certain number per second with a fairly high burst solved the problem. He liked playing WoW and when his WoW connection started getting all weird and I told him it was his P2P sofware he started to make sure it wasn't running. The average cap I set was plenty enough for WoW and enough for a decent download speed for P2P as well.

I'm all for bandwidth throttling and traffic shaping as long as it's to ensure usage fairness. If I were running an ISP I would have a per-customer 5 minute bandwidth meter and customers who had exceeded their share for 5 minutes would have all their traffic dropped to the lowest priority until there was a 5 minute interval in which they hadn't exceeded their share.

And it would be share of total pipe available to the ISP's upstreams, not some arbitrary fixed cap per customer. If the P2P application were written to favor connecting to other customers of the ISP that would be a way to avoid the re-prioritization completely.