[clue-tech] bandwidth issues

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 16 August 2008 13:57, David L. Anselmi wrote:
> 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?

Yes.  I have noatun running on folkalley.com,  and if the congestion gets too 
bad it just crashes the connection...  (Probably not the best app for the 
purprose,   but it works mostly.)

> > 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.

I don't get too involved with what he's running on that box.  Somebody said 
something about him doing whatever he was doing with limewire?

> 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.

Second recommendation for that,  I'll have to give it a shot...

> 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.

It's nice that I can specify IP address with wondershaper.  Since I'm the 
network administrator,  I decide what those are gonna be.  :-)

> 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.

I'll fiddle with that script some,  and see what I can do with it.

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