Muzman on 3/3/2009 at 19:50
Greetings.
I share an internet connection with three other machines (cable and wireless) and my housemates are complete idiots a lot of the time when it comes to bandwidth. Doesn't matter what I say. I can still go out to work or something and come home to find they've decided to get some cask wine and watch everything on youtube, racking up gigs and gigs worth (our peak time quota for the month is ten gigs). They always try to get the fastest download speeds so that they will be finished downloading sooner. This is what I have to put up with.
I've tried policing it to a limited extent but my router software doesn't have a lot of options.
What I want is some monitoring program so that I can get all sysadmin on their ass, so to speak. I want to watch each machine's traffic and be able to cap it (restricting would be nice but I can live with crudely cutting them off).
Is this relatively easy to do? Does anyone know any good cheap (preferably free) programs that might be good for this?
I'm looking at a few options, but thought I'd ask here as well.
cheers
Al_B on 3/3/2009 at 21:57
Quote Posted by Muzman
They always try to get the fastest download speeds so that they will be finished downloading sooner. This is what I have to put up with.
If they're going to download X amount then that's not really going to be affected by how quickly they download it. It's still going to count towards your ISPs limit regardless of the speed.
My gut feeling is that if you limit the traffic (regardless of how you do it) you will be public enemy number one among your housemates. The best solution is probably to convince them to pay more so you can move to something with unlimited bandwidth.
If that's not possible then the thread here: (
http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/limiting-the-internet-share/165955.html) http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/limiting-the-internet-share/165955.html seems similar to your situation. Without being able to stick a router under your control between the housemates computers and the internet connection you're not going to come to any true solution, however.
Muzman on 5/3/2009 at 20:39
Quote:
If they're going to download X amount then that's not really going to be affected by how quickly they download it. It's still going to count towards your ISPs limit regardless of the speed.
Exactly. You see what I have to put up with? ;)
Cheers fellas. I should have explianed a bit better: It's my connection, my router, heck my name is the only one on the lease. There isn't going to be any dispute if I rule with an iron fist. (they usually know when they've been bad, they just don't know why and they
just can't help themselves sometimes. It's fine). We're currently paying far too much for barely acceptable speeds thanks to a torturous Aus infrastructure SNAFU that would take too long to explain. So I'm reluctant to pay any more for more quota right now.
The router is a netgear DG834G. All those custom firmwares seem to be for a specific chipset or something which mine doesn't appear to have, dammit. They sounded perfect.
Oh well, I'll have a look at that Netlimiter thing and see how that goes. Are software options any good? Does anyone have any familiarity with them?
Al_B on 5/3/2009 at 22:41
OK - thanks for the clarifications, those help a lot. The fact you're in control of the connection, pay for it and presumably can physically stop people from just plugging into it directly will help. I'm not familiar with the DG834G router but if netlimiter is no use then I would suggest the following:
* Set up a Linux (or similar) computer as a router between the network connections and the external network.
* Enforce network IP allocation based on MAC addresses, possibly by using a DHCP server on the Linux box.
* Configure iptables to support quota management (ipt_quota)
* Configure network rules to limit external network traffic from specific source addresses (i.e. your housemate's network addresses) and the internet. Take a look at (
http://linuxgazette.net/108/odonovan.html) http://linuxgazette.net/108/odonovan.html step 7 but you'll probably need to add a destination address argument for it to work.
* Reset the network limits every month (probably using crontab).
None of the above is exactly 'plug and play' but unfortunately most other traffic limiting tools only limit instantaneous speed and not traffic over a given period of time.
You'll also need to deal with the wireless network connections by getting a separate wireless adapter, putting it on the 'local' side of the network and disabling the wireless features of your existing router. Then, you could allocate a particular network quota to the wireless connection.
There are other advantages to the above, such as being able to provide secure remote access, running server (e.g. email) applications, setting up a web proxy ((
http://www.squid-cache.org/) http://www.squid-cache.org/) and hosting some common file storage so it doesn't just have to be for the purpose that you require. It'll just be a bit of a jump into the deep-end if you're not confident about network protocols or network servers.
Muzman on 28/3/2009 at 06:04
Heh, wow cheers. I think that's a bit beyond my acceptable effort quotient for this problem. I'd rather buy a new router and use one of those custom firmwares.
I think I see the problem though; I can't really interdict the connection from my computer without placing it completely between the router/modem and everyone else.
Or can I? I've got the demo of that Netlimiter pro but I can't seem to make it do anything (or can't tell if it is doing anything). I think I put the other computers' IPs in right (might have got the subnet mask wrong) but I can't seem to look at their traffic graphs or anything. Maybe I can't, I dunno. The help really isn't terribly so. Interestingly I've started getting machines trying to use the same IP. Don't know if it's connected to this.
Anyway, if anyone's got some clues on how it works that'd be great.
Al_B on 28/3/2009 at 22:04
Not sure about netlimiter - but i suspect that to get it to work you'd need to install it on each PC, not just your own.
It's likely that your router is routing traffic directly to the internet from your housemates PC without it being presented to your network interface. This means that that you'll never see their traffic and can't monitor it (or how much traffic is being used). If you can configure your router into hub mode then you may be able to see traffic - but that may not be possible.
