[clue-tech] bandwidth issues

[David L. Anselmi]

Roy J. Tellason wrote:
> I have most of what's on the LAN here (3 machines at the moment and the 
> firewall/router,  a 486 box running linux) playing well together.  But!
> 
> One family member,  running XP,  I think (some version of windoze anyhow) is 
> hogging bandwidth here.  "Downloading a movie" I'm told.  It's at the point 
> where it's starting to seriously interfere with other LAN traffic,  like 
> crashing my music,  which only wants 56k of my 768k of available download 
> bandwidth.

You mean that it's interfering with other Internet traffic, right?

> What options are there to limit the usage on that particular machine?  
> Something I can configure in the firewall/router?  Something else?

I would suggest using a download app that can be told not to use all the 
bandwidth.  rsync will.  Maybe that's not easy on XP.

The bandwidth arbitrator project was designed to solve your problem.  A 
quick google says that wondershaper might be a simple way to get what 
you want.

Simple solutions are going to make assumptions though, so for example if 
a movie and your music wind up being treated the same they may still 
interfere with each other.  In that case you have to go figure out how 
to roll your own.

An easy first cut would be to guarantee a fraction of bandwidth to each 
machine.  I wonder whether openwrt, smoothwall,  or similar projects 
have that sort of thing built in.

There are howtos on packet shaping that seem easy enough.  Be nice if 
there's an app that turns your config into a picture.

Dave