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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?"
Which version? Check the model tag, it should say there...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Install OpenWrt, then:
/etc/config/qos
ipkg install qos-scripts
vi
[ enter your linespeed in the right place ]
qos-start
How about just nicely explaining the problem to him, and requests he runs his P2P stuff overnight when no one is using the connection?
If that doesn't work, well, his port on the switch might mysteriously fail during waking hours.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Seriously. An arms race is not going to solve your problem.
Just set up QoS such that VOIP, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and whatever else you care about gets prioritized.
In the days of Napster, a nephew of mine spent a year living with me while going to college nearby.
His use of Napster would make the cable modem connection unusable. In response, I'd go to the home firewall device (had one of the early Linksys models) and block the traffic.
He thought the cable company was doing it.
Beat the shit out of the fucker.
Tell this person to stop being a hog and to drop upload and download speeds so that other people can use the net. This is a social problem that doesn't need a techno fix. Either that or tell them to get their own connection, stop sharing it with them.
Set up QoS, set bittorrent protocol to Bulk and everything else to standard. If you are using VoIP, you might want to set it [VoIP] to Premium.
All done through a simple GUI interface. Enjoy!
you can put it between the router and the net if you're using the wireless capabilities.
a forum about traffic shaping with smoothwall
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?s=dffc19493975498724b50564217f05e4&showtopic=3250&pid=11502&st=0&#entry11502
smoothwall linux
http://www.smoothwall.org/
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Works Great but took some work to get it all setup IpCop 1.4.18 QoS Kernel QoS NG 1.5.1 I had to modify some code to get the filter rules to update off of sourceforge.
Switch to Comcast!
a. 1st off and most importantly make sure the internet connection isn't in your name so you are not the one who gets sued by the RIAA b. go get DD-WRT (check your WRT54G version..later one's suck) then set up the traffic shaping QoS feature. http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Quality_of_Service
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
My Linksys WRT54G is notorious for getting slower and slower over time when we use P2P here at the house. I found that rebooting it every day helped. Not even DD-WRT made that problem go away. I think the Linksys just didn't have enough "oomph" to do traffic shaping. There's an interesting solution I came up with - buy a second Linksys and flash it with DD-WRT. Turn on traffic shaping for all ports. Use the second Linksys as your Internet facing router, and leave the default firmware on it, but define the second Linksys as your DMZ system. It works, and for some reason the first Linksys doesn't need to be rebooted all the time.
-Somebody stole this sig.
Lay down the smack on the family...its the best traffic shaping you can do in the house. Who wears the pants? Not even ComCast can stop traffic like that!
I have the same issue at home, except I'm the one who is running bittorrent. As of right now, it is not perfect, but it has greatly improved since I started doing tweaks. The first thing I did was install DD-WRT on the router. After that, I maxed the connection limit to 4096 and set the timeout to a low setting, like 5 minutes. From there, I did some modifications to the QoS settings. If a wired connection is used, set his connection to the lowest priority, and the rest to the top priority. This is not perfect, so I'm still tweaking things to obtain a better outcome. The other suggestion is to tell him to use the scheduler feature found in the bittorrent client; a little bit of downtime at peak times goes a long way to keep harmony at home. -Lilkat
Raise priority for
- Web (Http and https, maybe also 8080)
- DNS (UDP:53)
- Mail (SMTP, IMAP, POP3 (including SSL versions))
- IRC (if you use)
- FTP
- SSH, Telnet
- All TCP acknowledgement packets.
- Maybe some gaming protocols (Directplay, WoW, etc - these unfortunately require checking docs for each game)
that way, you have whitelisted most of the "interactive" protocols that suffer from loaded link. No need to keep chasing after the latest encrypted, onion routed P2P application that happens to be flavor of the month. The biggest problem is the online gaming stuff.
I love how people pimp their own client. But nearly every PTP client I've touched, has bandwidth limiting. Some of them, uTorrent included, allows you to schedule your bandwidth.
The real problem here isn't traffic shaping, but about traffic courtesy. Your housemate may not know how much trouble their causing. Talk to them. Get them to set their max speeds to 1/2 or 1/4 of the available bandwidth.
They may be surprised when their OWN web browsing gets better.
Yet this does all hinge on you talking to said housemate. Go talk. I've had the "talk" and been the person talking to the housemate. It usually works out well.
You would have to be crazy to be sane in this world. -Nero
hey, I will get some bashing, but this works: http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/ I noticed that traffic shaping adds some latency (~20ms), and you have to be willing to give up some bandwidth for it to work propery. For example, if you're on 3Mbps DSL, you want to set your router to throttle you at maybe 2Mbps, or 90% of what you acutally get most of the time, so the router is alwasy throttling before the ISP, and the router can properly prioritize packets.
It also has QoS features, and a nice AJAX interface.
Presumably saying "Hey, dude, can you throttle the hell out of your P2P? I'm getting no net whatsoever." is not an option.
If so, yeah, you could try looking into the alternate firmwares for the router; they let you throttle stuff based on ports. You'll have to look at the serial number to know for sure if you can stick that in, or spend like $80 or whatever for the WRTGL, which has enough firmware space to do fun things.
egypt urnash minimal art.
What about talking to the housemate to get them to use a less aggressive client? Most P2P software that I know of has bandwidth cap options built in, which makes me think the poster is trying to do this under the table. How is the housemate going to react if/when they find out about it? Is this really a problem that's best addressed with technology?
Visit the
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.
Insist they use a client that can behave itself. I believe that Azeurus and MicroTorrent are in that category - and require they tune it down to a responsible level.
tell him that his .torrent-ing is adversely affecting your social life on WoW. He'll either understand, or not.
If not, just use some DPS and hide behind the couch....
If the issue is only with a limited numbers of computers running P2P software, and that software doesn't have options of limiting bandwidth built in, the simplest solution would be a client-side bandwidth limiter. There are plenty (see your favorite search engine) available that let you throttle bandwidth use for specific applications.
http://games.dlink.com/products/?pid=370
Works well, but is rather expensive. Has an oversized NAT table to help with UDP server pings, so this will remedy and torrent problems you might have with your current setup.
QoS system is fairly flexible with an intuitive GUI and many preconfigured service options.
Has an option to pack the output frames completely (harms XBox Live possibly) as well as delay non-prio packets in favour of VOIP/gaming/as you configure.
Matt
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pf.conf 'nuf said
First step would be to find out what type of P2P he's using and (if it's not recognized by DD-WRT) what ports. Drop those down to bulk priority. Raise special activities like https web browsing to express (on the assumption that connecting to an https server means you're doing something important like accessing your bank). Stuff that's time-critical like VoIP and gaming should get premium priority. This took care of 90% of the problems I had.
The remaining 10% proved extremely tricky. Newer bittorrent clients default to encryption on, and it was getting by the QoS. I tried tweaking all sorts of settings to mitigate this without success. What eventually worked was a setting anything on ports higher than 1024 to bulk priority, then specifying certain ports as having higher priority. This is the QoS equivalent of switching from allow all and blocking things you don't want, to deny all and allowing things you do want. That seems to have solved the bittorrent problem.
The only problems that remain have to do with http and ftp transfers of large files. If someone sticks a 40 MB file on a web site, the router can't tell it apart from regular http traffic, so you can't drop its priority without also affecting regular web browsing. In one case a user was running a program to download an entire web site - that was killing the network since to the router it looked just like a lot of web browsing. Same with ftp - if you drop ftp's priority so the 100 MB transfers are bulk, the small ftp files like certain software updates are also bulk.
Most of the Linksys routers I've encounter have some quality of service functionality built into them. In my experience QoS is under Applications and Gaming along with port forwarding etc. Any way if you enable it, you'll have several options avaliable for restricting his bandwidth hogging. Be it changing the traffic priority by mac address, protocol, or port.
Hope that helps
There are a bunch of options for open-source firmware that will do traffic-shaping on your router. I personally use Tomato for the AJAXy goodness and overall usability.
You can do limits based on individual devices, which will keep any computer from ever saturating the network, or you can do time-based throttling, or whatever. I found the most useful setup was to make everything default to low priority and then raise the priority of HTTP, SSH, and other things I wanted to run interactively.
As long as nobody on the network is selfish enough to try and run their p2p app over port 80 or something stupid like that, it works fine. But any home router config will depend on the users not trying to get around it -- it's a tool for your mutual convenience, so that people can set their apps to be aggressive and get the most performance, but won't step on others' toes when they're trying to get something done.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Nerf guns at 20 paces, last nerd standing wins!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
In the Administration section, on the Management page, make some changes to the IP Filter Settings. Set the Maximum Ports to 4096 (the maximum), and the Timeout values for both TCP and UDP to 120 seconds.
Running Azureus used to kill all the other network activity on my LAN. These changes made all the difference in the world.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
dsniff's tcpkill does wonderful things... ;-)
Whenever I'm downloading a file off of BitTorrent that's actually seeded okay and gets to a decent speed, no one else (including me) can use the Internet because it lags the hell out of everything. I have a Linksys WRT54G wireless router and Comcast Internet by the way.
So what's the best way to stop this?
Just sign up with Comcast :-)
I think a lot of the posts that suggest that the right solution is talking to the roommate and potentially some client settings are wrongheaded.
Most people don't care if their P2P download is slowed down a little from HTTP traffic (which is practically in the noise by comparison most of the time, really). In fact, some of those same people would prefer *their* web browsing sessions remain fast while torrenting. The only reason to go for client-side bandwidth throttling or scheduling is because the traffic shaping options can take more expertise and (depending on implementation) may not work ideally -- it is often possible to (sometimes accidentally) abuse many QoS heuristics by, say, spawning a lot of connections.
Traffic shaping (in this case, if effective) will allow you to achieve greater link utilization (they can use 100% of the link when nobody is browsing) and absolve the issue of how one resolves multiple users on the same network wanting to make use of "low-priority" bandwidth. It simply makes life easier, should you be able to set it up.
In any case, the *WRTs (DD-WRT seems to be the easiest) seem to work okay, of course, I'd be interested to hear about other options....
aka traffic shaping
Hi, how can I set up DD-WRT & QoS on Linksys WRT54G with the latest Tomato Firmware already installed? Thanks! -NKA
Even if you come to an agreement about putting in some speed caps, it'd probably be best to set up some sort of QoS. That way, your roommate's downloads are always using up 100% of whatever tube-space is left over after all the other stuff (including whatever he's doing). Maximize efficiency 'n stuff.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
The cheapest route to go would be the DD-WRT firmware that other people have mentioned, although then you get into some issues that many people want to avoid.
Personally, I was very happy with the DGL-4300 router from D-Link. It will let you specify QoS settings, and it also lets you prioritize certain games and certain applications, and will also let you be computer specific.
I originally got the router because I was actually hogging my own bandwidth. Before the router, capping my bandwidth via an FTP download or torrent would lag everything else. Now, I prioritized my games and I can maintain a 60 ms ping in an online FPS game while capping out my download at several mbit per second. What really really impressed me was that D-Link has the ports and protocols preprogrammed in for a large variety of games and applications, including bittorent.
Screenshot of the interface
The same thing sounds like it can be done via the DD-WRT firmware, just possibly not quite as elegantly. D-Link also has a new 802.11n GameFuel router (the DGL-4300 I use is 802.11b/g only) but all of the prices I have found on the N router so far have been really, really ridiculously high.
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
Netpriva has an application level shaping solution. They used to have a "free" trial product. The company was a MBO from a company called "foursticks". Give that a try.
He's not an ISP, so the same rules don't apply.
Also, chances are, QoSing BitTorrent down in that house will probably still let it run close to full speed, as there probably aren't another few hundred people trying to look at YouTube at the same time. Web browsing really dosen't take that much bandwidth.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I use pfSense and its QoS tools. I never have problems with my web browsing being affected by my p2p traffic. I have also used smoothwall, which works well also. The downside of these is you have to have a spare computer to install them on, but I have found that the hardware in off the shelf routers isn't powerful enough to properly manage a fast internet connection. Another trick, make sure you do both up and down stream QoS.
There is some controversy surrounding DD-WRT; you must decide if you want to support them or not. I use OpenWrt with the X-Wrt extension, which also has powerful QoS functionality in a GUI.
OpenWRT hardware requirements If it's version 4.0 or earlier (or the L model), it has enough RAM and flash (16MB, 4MB respectively) to run OpenWRT, or other wrt54g-friendly distributions. (OpenWRT is pretty cool; it has an olsrd package you can install from the web configurator, and with a little bit of effort you can make an ad-hoc mesh. Not useful for traffic shaping, but interesting nonetheless. I expect there are probably tools available to do traffic shaping with OpenWRT as well, I just never needed to mess with that.)
This is total bullshit. uTorrent is the most popular bittorrent client by far for a very good reason. It's the best win32 client available. It was bought by Bitorrent inc, and is now their official client, afaik. Provide a reliable site, please.
I've had good results with pfsense. Nice GUI, not too hard to set up, shapes traffic well enough that web browsing does not slow down appreciably. Games are tougher though, but I'm not in the same boat as you - if I want to game I just ensure that I'm not downloading anything at the time. I suspect I could have my cake and eat it too, but currently it's too much effort.
:)
I tried smoothwall, m0n0wall, IPCop, and pfsense before settling on pfsense. YMMV.
From memory, I did a google search of slashdot and "traffic shaping" to uncover those options.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Grab the Tomato firmware for your Linksys. Tomato's QoS features are much easier to configure than others like DDWRT. With Tomato, you don't need to be a Linux networking guru to do what you want. Tomato also handles P2P very well. You can pound a WRT54 running Tomato with heavy P2P traffic 24/7 for months with no perfmrance problems. No resets required. Grab it here http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
use "Tomato" - it lets you dynamicly change the priority of a connection depending on the upload/download size.
eg. you can say all HTTP downloads over 1MB get lower priority. It will also work for keep-alive connections so it will work if your flatmate is downloading "a whole website" (since the total size of the site is over 1MB)
As someone mentioned in a previous post, it's much easier to just whitelist priorized services such as ssh, telnet or gaming protocols than wasting too much CPU cycles on detecting obscure P2P protocols with layer 7 filters.
... ...
Personally, I use iptables & tc to setup a simple HTB (Hierarchical Token Bucket filter) system with 3 priority levels:
- Interactive: SSH (with Minimize-Delay TOS-Flag), Telnet, Jabber,
- Medium: HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3,
- Low: All the rest
Shaping the upload speed is my only concern. All 3 classes may use the complete upload bandwidth. The interactive HTB class gets a guaranteed 90% of the bandwidth and a high burst value. The lowest HTB class has a burst of 0 and about 5% guaranteed upload speed.
While this is only primitive setup, it allows lag-free ssh with an unlimited upload in the background.
An in-depth how-to about the Linux Traffic Control system: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/index.html
A short pragmatic example using HTB & SFQ can be found here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Packet_Shaping
I have a DGL-4500. With it I can block computers from accessing the Internet altogether.
I can set priorities for traffic. The VOIP box is level 1 (The highest) most of the other computers are level 125. (The middle of the range)
The computer that does my BitTorrent stuff is set at level 255 (The lowest setting). That way it only uses the "Leftover" bandwidth.
There is also a setting where I can just block BitTorrent traffic also.
My response would be to warn him that if he does not fix the settings on his Torrent client, that you will have to change the router settings to allow others to use the Internet, and his torrenting may be completely blocked.
Instead of cheaping out spend $30 a month for your own cable or DSL connection. Or, as many have suggested, just talk to the guy.
Barring that just connect the 220v dryer line to the wall socket in his room and hope that he got his power bar for $5.99 at WalMart.
Or even better please all of your room-mates and just move.
Three Squirrels
This is true up to a point. It should be easy to get the offending roommate to cap their bandwidth, but it should also be easy to install a traffic-shaping router (though sadly it's not), and then the problem would be solved without having to get the cooperation of everyone (and every program on every computer) on the network, and for everyone to be constantly self-policing their own network usage.
To solve the problem in one place at a higher layer of abstraction will be more likely to prevent the problem from recurring in a different form later on.
Of course, being on friendly terms with your roommates about these sorts of issues is more important than how the problem is ultimately resolved.
Tell him if he doesn't stop using P2P while everyone else is awake and using the net then you're going to cave his skull in with his monitor.
You'll either make him stop or make him press charges. Either way it probably won't be an issue for you anymore.
Trojan horse? AC, meet reality.
"uTorrent no matter how many security professionals classify it as a Trojan horse."
Liar.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Stay away from the third party "DD-WRT" firmware if you use any form of P2P. Due to some unresolved bugs in the firmware, any form of BitTorrent makes the router completely unresponsive, not even responding to the router's web interface.
I've a WRT54G with stock firmware in it. It has QoS in it from the factory. What's the problem here? What's with all this DD-WRT stuff? My default firmware is easy to use and works every time.
I'm sure the reaction of physical violence isn't one most Slashdot readers would take. All that heavy breathing would just tire us out too quickly.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
From the uTorrent FAQ: "The default firmware for Linksys (and all replacement firmwares except for the latest DD-WRT and HyperWRT Thibor) have a severe problem where they track old connections for FIVE days, which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates."
Does NOT apply to WRT54G/GS v5 and up.
HTH
This one may be more effective.
Or save the ten bucks a month in electricity and show him how to set his bandwidth limits in his client.
The lengths people will go to avoid social interaction these days.
I have been using Net Limiter (http://www.netlimiter.com/) for a while. It limits throughput per program, although it runs on each individual computer and requires the settings to be made on the computer, so if he changes or disables the limit, it'll affect speed again.
If he's not got a P2P client that lets him reduce its bandwidth use, get him to use one that does.
Alternatively, insert a cheap PC with 2 LAN interfaces (NICs), running SmoothWall (firewall) between your ADSL modem & your switch.
Among other things, SmoothWall can regulate bandwidth to guarantee each of you fair amounts.
Actually, there OUGHT TO BE a ONE MORE FEATURE - yet to be developed? - in any such device:
When one isn't using their portion of the bandwidth (& -certainly- when not connected to the switch or SmoothWall firewall), it should insure that all bandwidth goes to the one who is (& vice versa).
Is there any OSS firewall, etc. that does that?
TIA
From here.
Set up QoS rules as you like. If he's cooperative about it, downgrade the bittorrent priority based on the ports he uses for it. If he's not, just downgrade all his traffic.
If you can't have a frank conversation about communal resource usage with your own roommate than your have much bigger problems than mere router configuration will ever solve.
I'm sure you guys have laid down basic guidelines governing how you'll split up paying for and using shared stuff. Like, "Hey dude, if you insist on running that 20 node Beowulf cluster in your room to crunch SETI work units all day, you should pay more for electricity." Or if nothing that specific, at least rules along the lines of "neither of us should monopolize the common area on a consistent basis preventing the other from ever having guests over."
I don't think shared Internet usage should be any different. If you're the administrator of the network at home, it seems that what you're suggesting would be tantamount to setting up bear traps in the common area to discourage over foraging by your inconsiderate roommate. Of course, if he/she is that much of a boor, maybe you have no choice.
Bottom line though: it would probably be better to talk it over with your roommate rather than putting the smack down with filters and such... in the end, there'll be a lot less resentment from both ends.
Honestly, this is the reason ISPs are moving toward throttling, packet shaping, and simply capping the bandwidth. There's a minority of bit torrent users hoarding the bandwidth so that they can hoard piles and piles of movies, music, and games that they have no reasonable expectation of using. "hey check it out man, I have the entire Simpson's series dubbed in Japanese!"
New! Device Legs: These legs will help your poor OEM installed product escape any hamfistedness it may encounter. Ava
Whether your roommate knows he's using all the bandwidth or not you should approach him about it and settle it.
When did people get so afraid of each other?
PM
Both Monwall and Pfsense have excellent traffic shaping as well as easy to use GUI wizards to help you throttle P2P. Unfortunately they won't load on your Linksys but they are so much more powerful than even DD-WRT.
http://m0n0.ch/wall/
http://www.pfsense.com/
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Run performance monitor by pressing Start, selecting Run, typing "perfmon" and pressing OK. You should get something that looks somewhat like this: Empty Perfmon Right click in the empty chart area and select Add Counters... and you should see something like this: Perfmon Counter Add Dialog The Performance Object dropdown lists several objects on your computer whose performance can be measured. The Processor, for example, is one. In that list select Network Interface, and the result looks like this: Perfmon Counter Add Network Interface The first list at the bottom of the dialog allows you to select which counters relating to that object you want to monitor. The second list allows you to select which object if there are more than one. In this example we'll select my "Intel Pro" network card on the right, and "Bytes Total/Sec" on the left. Press Add and Close and you'll see perfmon start to report the total bytes traversing the network card over time. After a little while in my example, it looks like this: Perfmon Counter Add Network Interface Perfmon is an incredibly powerful monitoring tool. There are lots of things available to monitor, and many display options. I encourage you to play around with it some. Of special note is the Select Counters from Computer option in the Add Counters dialog above. Perfmon allows you to monitor the performance of another Windows XP, 2000 or NT computer remotely, across your LAN. This means, for example, if someone on your network is hogging all the bandwidth then you can monitor each machine remotely in real time to see just who that might be. Monitoring is fairly easy. In addition to Perfmon there are certainly many third party applications that will allow you to do the same with different display and even triggered actions. Control, on the other hand, is the bad news. True control of something shared like a DSL connection can be done, but it gets costly. It's typically performed by high end routers that allow you to specify, often in great detail, how the bandwidth should be allocated or prioritized. Unfortunately that's usually out of reach of the most home LANs. In all honesty if this were my situation I'd just make sure the router was in arms-reach of my desk, and the cables well labeled. Then I'd physically unplug the connection for any computers who's users I felt needed to spend more time in the "real world". But that's just me. from http://ask-leo.com/can_i_monitor_or_control_the_bandwidth_used_on_my_home_network.html
Definitely look at DD-WRT if your router is supported (depends on the version).
As an alternative, or additional measure, if he is running Windows, and if he will let you install something on his PC which will not significantly affect his downloading (and might improve it overall), but will definitely improve things for the rest of the network, download the 30-day trial of cFosSpeed and install it on his machine (running in multi-computer, non-cooperative mode).
http://www.cfos.de/speed/cfosspeed_e.htm
BTW, I paid for cFosSpeed after having it installed for 2 days - it's well and truly worth the 9 euros IMO, even if you've already got a traffic-shaping router (it tends to reduce the load on your router).
One way to get him to agree to try it is by telling him that it will allow him to play online games and do other online activities while downloading (this is true) and at the same time will allow him to increase his maximum upload speed in his P2P program (since cFosSpeed prioritises TCP ACKs).
If he's running linux, you can set up local traffic shaping yourself, but you'll have to go searching how.
The main thing for this though is to point out to him that this will improve the internet connection for everyone, including himself.
The zyxel x-550 has hardware qos that will do the job.
QoS is really a must if you're sharing a connection and somebody runs Bittorrent.
I disagree with the idea that traffic courtesy is the problem. We all want good torrent speeds. There is no reason to arbitrarily limit your torrents to 1/4 of the max upload bandwidth when the connection is probably going unused most of the time. Voluntary bandwidth limiting is still no substitute for a good router.
I have set up both (uncrippled and crippled) versions of Linksys wireless routers and a couple Buffalo routers with the same Broadcom chipsets. The DD-WRT has terrible QoS and should only be used when you need the lite version. Tomato is the way to go, as half of the posters seem to be saying.
You've already got a router up and running. Why not make it do its job efficiently? I think you underestimate the value of prioritizing web traffic and DNS queries. Before trying tomato, I put my uTorrent through the most draconian bandwidth caps I could think of. Upon switching from DD-WRT to Tomato (default settings), my household went from "my firefox doesn't work" to rock solid browsing all the time.
The best piece of professional advice I ever received was this:
"Don't use software to solve social problems"
This seems pretty apt here - instead of spending money and time trying to do this the hard way....
Just fucking smack him, and tell him to behave responsibly or lose his internet privileges.
"Ethernet Port Priority: You may control your data rate according to which physical LAN port your device is plugged into. You may assign Priorities accordingly for devices connected on LAN ports 1 through 4."
dd-wrt.com
Enjoy.
127.0.0.1
"Tomato is the way to go, as half of the posters seem to be saying."
my original suggestion was to use smoothwall's QoS. but some people felt tomato would be better than a smoothwall setup, the only reason i like smoothwall is you don't need to flash a hardware router, and if you use an older PC it will use less power running smoothwall than it ever did running windows, for whatever reason any PC from the 486 on, always uses less power running free open source software than running windows, i think it's the 'system idle thread' i think it literally makes the cpu busy out rather than fall asleep...
never had a problem with a Linux or BSD system doing no CPU activity, just routing a few packets and letting the cpu idle and use any on chip power savings... when i first switched my 486 from 24/7 windows to 24/7 freebsd (in 1996) i saved $10 a month in electric bills. (i still have the bills but they're in storage) plus, i never had to reboot freeBSD windows would crash every week.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
He's from the RIAA, and he's part of a research to find ways to fix the problem at the root.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I use ipcop http://www.ipcop.org/ for my home network - it's all of about 40 megs (well it was, I see the new update is quite a bit bigger so I may be low on that figure) and can run on any old pc lying around.
It can do the traffic shaping you're wanting, plus, I found, especially when I am doing p2p downloading or some online gaming, my old netgear (very old) couldn't keep up and would drop packets. I saw my download speeds go up significantly and I have the opportunity to do traffic shaping if needed.
It's free (donation) and very simple to set up. You don't have to be a linux guru to set it up, it has a web based interface for configuration.
It works great for me.
Illiterate? Write for free help!
First go to your bit torrent settings and setup maximum download speed to 350k a second. Second the default bittorent incoming connections is set to 200. Move it down to 85 connections.
This is with a 640k dsl connection at home and makes a HUGE difference.
Occasionally I move up the download speed to 450k a second if no one is playing wow or doing anything intensive online.
However if your isp is evil and is throttling down your whole connection then it wont make a different what your connection speed is. Even if your connection is only 5k a second your whole connection will be modded down to a 56k modem speed. THen your pretty much fucked.
If that doesn't work you can try the harder more exotic methods described in the other comments.
http://saveie6.com/
It's a pretty safe bet that what he's actually doing is saturating the upstream bandwidth. This will bog down the whole connection and make it feel like molasses.
A simple adjustment to his configuration will make everybody happy, including him - his download speed will increase.
Unfortunately this means you'll have to go and actually talk to him.
No sig today...
Even the most expensive residential router chokes on the shear number of connections your average P2P client tries to maintain.
I modified my WRT54G's setting to be just a wireless access point and switch by disabling the DHCP server - then built a cheap Smoothwall firewall using an old P3 800Mhz with a pair of pci nics.
DSL -> Smoothwall -> LAN Port 1 on WRT54
Leaving the WAN port unused, I still have three ports for wired PCs (nearly unlimited with the addition of more switches) and wireless works without a hitch. The WRT's job is just to be a switch and manage wireless authentication and encryption.
The Smoothwall easily handles the traffic without slowing down other clients and (bonus) has QoS built in.
It also provides web caching, email antivirus, DNS, NTP, Snort IDS, and so much more.
Oh, and it's totally open source and available for download from smoothwall.org
Good points, valid points, granted, and what exactly do the computer makers think people actually *do* with hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space, type up school reports and recipes? And look at the freekin ads for the big ISPs, smiling happy people and advertising "blazing download speeds, enjoy movies" and etc. So? Where's the beef when people really try to do that? Why does unlimited really mean limited in the fine print?
This is like the wink wink nod nod industry. The big pipe providers (in the US) though already got paid 200 billion dollars to roll out true high speed internet all over and did about bupkis with it except squabble over the low hanging profitable fruit in some select areas. The bulk of the nation gets grade C alleged broadband or not even that. Cry me a river of crocodile tears, like the auto industry in the US saying they can't make high MPG cars when they *sell* high MPG cars in Europe. In short, always read between the lines when big corporations bitch about stuff. It's just *cheaper* for them to do "throttling, packet shaping, and simply capping the bandwidth." than it is to actually, you know, improve the infrastructure from end to end. The fatcats Cxx whatevers and big pirate wallstreet "investors" ain't happy being millionaires anymore, nope, that ain't enough, they all got to be *billionaires* now and the only way to do that is to screw their customers over and bribe off government so they can get away with it.
Frankly, being on dialup and being told directly by the lineman when they ran out new phone wire when I moved in here that they would *never* install anything good enough for DSL unless ordered to by the government (that is an exact quote when I asked him him if I could now get dsl and he was a smug and condescending ass about it too, BTW, near giggling over being able to screw a customer by charging for tissue paper phone lines with constant buzz and noise and crappy connections), I have little sympathy for the monopoly broadband folks and the entrenched telco cartels. I also have little sympathy for that roomate who was hogging what was available, and offered two fast solutions to that exact problem, because I have been in that situation with roomates and that is what we did, multiple lines, problem solved. If that crap-geting full seasons of the simpsons dubbed in japanese-is so important to someone, that they have to leech 24/7, let them get their own freeking line, that's what an adult would do anyway (loosely used term for anyone who would actually do that of course..seems rather silly to me, and the other roomate who I guess the net connections name is in is leaving him or herself open to getting *popped* by the the MAFIAA some day, another boneheaded decision). But if the telco folks would have their feet held to the fire by the government and the FCC the US could be on top and not like number 16 in the developed world for decent net connectivity, and then everyone might have some decent throughput and bandwith.
Most places, if its cable, they've been there for years and have been milking a granted local monopoly with zero competition (and I remember before they even started, sat through a county commission hearing when they promised "no commercials, really, trust us!"). If it is the phone company, they've been mostly milking the same wires they strung up when alex bell was running things. I grew up with the "one" phone company and their pure asshattery corporate mindset, and I can tell you, it never went away even after they were allegedly "broken up", it's just a cartel now instead of one company. All that money they got went someplace, but a whole heaping pile of that 200 billion did not go into the last mile solution very many places except at the bare minimum possible level they could claim was "broadband".
I had the same problem about 6 months ago. I found a simple solution. Just unplug the wireless router and cable modem for about 10 minutes. Worked like a charm.
Of course, this only works if you are the responsible party when the bill comes due. If there is argument, I just leave it unplugged overnight. They'll come around.
If on the other hand, you are the rider, and they pay for the service, then they also call the shots. If you split the bill, then split the service too. If they keep it up, just stop paying.
This is called negotiation. If it is more of a marriage situation, then you will need to do more sensitive and caring negotiations.
If approached gently, most people will throttle it down for you, without any display of power. After all, you would, wouldn't you?
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I'm the OP. I've asked them several times to stop, and he just straight up refuses. Plus, running QoS on the WRT54G severely slows the whole thing down, so that doesn't work. Unless you mean the roommates client, in which case I refer to the above section of the post. Also, since running it my electricity hasn't gone up any noticeable difference. A single computer without a monitor doesn't use that much electricity.
:(){
talking to her will be a lot less fun.
If u're using Windows i'd suggest u to try cFosSpeed (www.cfosspeed.com), it does traffic shaping on windows and has l7 detection, i use it at home where among me and my housemates we have about 10 computers connected to the same line, and everything works fine, even if we have a highly asymmetric line (20Mb down/1Mb up), and even if we have several P2P programs working at the same time.
Other than by l7 detection it can prioritize traffic by the program's filename, which is very useful since many P2P programs today use data encryption, which makes l7 detection difficult. However, this is possible only on the computer the program is installed on, so best solution is to have one computer online 24/7 to share the connection, shape it with cFosSpeed, and also have any P2P programs installed there, so they'll get the proper priority. And by the way remember to raise the connections limit in XP also.
Only drawback? it's shareware, but not expensive indeed and u can test it for free for 30 days.
It's not just a courtesy thing. You can solve a lot with traffic shaping and other configuration, allowing your roommate to maintain relatively high bittorrent speeds and still have a decent web surfing experience. The one thing, mentioned above, is QoS. The other thing you might want to look into is the size of your router's NAT table and its TCP timeouts. If your roommate has 500 concurrent TCP connections out of a possible 512, that's going to slow you way down. If, on the other hand, you're looking at 500 out of a possible 4096, you should be in a lot better shape. You'll still *notice* when there are bittorrents running, but your internet should still be usable.
Get a new roommate! People who refuse to take consideration of others are an impossible situation to deal with all around.
I've heard this about a single machine running not being noticeable, but when you have roommates the power consumption tends to be different each month. Once I ditched mine, I was able to pay attention to the bills more and even a P3 700 with a single HDD would easily push my bill up $10/mo or so. Because of this, I just ditched it and use the WRT, which is much more sane on it's consumption.
I agree, tho, the WRT will go to hell if it has too much running on it. With all the bashing of the factory firmware going on, I can say I tried all of them and doing server refreshes in shooters was a lot better with the factory firmware than any of the other ones. If one person is sitting around playing WoW or browsing the web, I don't think it'd be noticeable, but any time it's getting hammered, it'll show.
Now go kick out the roomie.
Why not take a look at m0n0wall http://m0n0.ch/wall/ it provides many features only available on commercial routers and has an excellent traffic shaping tool. The traffic shaper can be setup using the simple wiziard or by creating advanced pipes and queues. Screenshots of the traffic shaper can be found on this page http://m0n0.ch/wall/screenshots.php
sometimes, asking isn't enough. ... excessive ... with his bittorrent usage.
My present roommate is a bit
Since I never quite figured out how to qos all his torrent traffic, i just took to unplugging his computer. I've asked repeatedly, and he repeatedly pushes the envelope, so meh. When he wakes up without internet, it's his problem, and if he has an issue with it, he can fix it by capping his stuff.
I just don't get why it's necessary to consume 100k/s or more of upload traffic for bittorrent at ANY time whatsoever. Besides that, he isn't the only one who uses bittorrent, and it's unfair to others if they can't because it makes web surfing impossible between the two of them.
Social interaction reduced the problem, but did not eliminate it. This is why the router is in the open.
No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
For P2P stuff, pfSense has excellent traffic shaping rules that really work. Compared to everything else I have tried, including alternative Linksys firmwares, if someone using P2P maxes out the connection simply prioritising HTTP/VOIP isn't going to help much. pfSense is a bit more complex than that. Plus, you can use it to simply place an absolute cap on the amount of upload bandwidth available to P2P apps.
I wrote a blog entry with some more info on configuring it: http://mojochan.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/traffic-shaping-with-pfsense/
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As others have said, communication is key here. I think the direction of the conversation hinges on whether or not he helps pay for the connection.
If not, remind him that it is your connection and that you have to set some rules. If he does, suggest that he either adopts a bandwidth cap or gets his own connection.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
93% of experts polled say that the most effective and efficient answer is to upgrade to Housemate 2.0, which will also resolve a lot of other nagging resource sharing issues that at first glance may seem unrelated.
Caveat: 89% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Other caveat: it can still be funny even if it is unoriginal.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Packet_Shaping
One program that I've had a lot of luck with is cfosSpeed (www.cfos.de). It's windows only, but does a damned good job of client level traffic shaping and control (better infact than any consumer router I've tried, and almost as good as a custom Smoothwall or m0n0wall box with detailed traffic shaping scripts).
Posting a request on Slashdot of all places requesting help with throttling...
Same message for you as for the ISP's: quit cheaping out & upgrade the fscking pipe!
Gawd why is it so hard for people to fsking understand that?
I understand that speaking to him in person could be difficult.
Send him an instant message.
The entire series in Japanese? Man do you have a link to that? Please please please?
What's wrong with telling the offending roommate to stop being a hog? That's why I titled my reply man up!, because that is what is needed the most. Sounds more like they are afraid of the room mate, if so, they have bigger issues than some internet connection. And bit torrent clients have settings where you can adjust speeds, plus number of torrents being downloaded at the same time. There's the simplest technical solution, just tell them to use the settings that are there and drop the demand side down a little so that others can use the net as well, there's no need to jump through exotic home router traffic shaping when the actual application the hog room mate is using can do it and the room mates should be able to discuss being a hog about things. What's next, the room mate drinks all the milk and rarely buys any, so you need to work out a milk delivery restriction schedule at the supermarket?
Sorry, I'll pass on the rube goldberg methods. And it is an ask slashdot, the person wanted opinions on how to solve the problem, so there ya go, this problem is a mountain out of a molehill with several easy solutions available.
The router at home runs a precompiled version of Gentoo with HTB init and ESFQ. Works great especially since there's one person here who used to suck up all bandwidth making the internet unusable for everyone else.
Well, if he's an asshat, then you have to get crafty on him. Go in behind the wall plate of his ethernet jack (assuming it isn't just running spaghetti-style around the house) and get the insulation off for as far as you can reach. Then untwist all the twisted pairs, and then re-connect the wiring. That should noisy-up his connection enough to slow him down, I should think. (maybe wrap the cable around a ferrite donut a couple times while you're at it?) Come to think of it, you could probably log into the router and turn his port speed down, too. Anyway, another thing you could do is refuse to share the bill with him if he's going to be a jackass. If he wants to share the cost, he has to share the bandwidth. Also leave his milk out overnight EVERY NIGHT. And urinate on his bedding. So basically, stealth warfare but not too stealthy. Good luck!
I mean since you are sharing the internet connection then he should not hog it all all the time. He can either limit it himself or you can tell him to get his own connection
This is an people problem.
fix teh people!
Darwin Hawking Blackmore
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