Bandwidth Limiting

[Carp1812]

I maintain a small wired and wireless network (+/- 16 computers) that shares a single DSL connection. I have a Linksys BEFSR41 router between the network and the DSL modem. The wireless is all limited by MAC address filtering and my DHCP pool doesn't show anything unusual, so I don't think that people are leeching my connection. (Besides that, it's all 802.11a and I can barely get a signal outside.) On the network, I have a Win2K Server machine hosting an active directory domain. Our budget is extremely limited right now. I think that the problem I'm having is caused by bandwidth hogging programs like Kazaa, etc. After much complaints from people about the speed of our connection, I've tried to explain that they can't leave programs like this running due to our poor upload bandwidth and mediocre download bandwidth. Apparently the speed gains aren't worth giving up these programs. Is there a way, using the router or the server, to limit the bandwidth that certain computers get? I have IP addresses and MAC addresses for the culprit machines. Also, is there a way to limit the bandwidth during specific times - ie. allow no restrictions in the evenings, but cap the hogs at 5 k/s during the day? Any suggestions that don't cost any additional money would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
CARP ><>

 

[Nothinman]

Doubt that Linksys will do what you want, most commercial offerings that do that require a lot of money.

The only thing I can think of right now would be to get a real firewall/proxy installed so that you can control access, because that Linksys probably doesn't have much in the way of granular access controls let alone traffic shaping. Unless I'm missing a piece of the puzzle, you're choices have become

1) Commercial boxed thing that costs a decent amount of money and probably has a pretty web interface that just wraps around BSD or Linux

2) install Linux yourself on an old/spare machine (anything from a 486 up would probably be fine depending on what you all want to do and memory would probably be a bigger concern than CPU speed) and learn how to restrict and control access yourself.

Being familiar with Linux already I'd have skipped the Linksys router in the first place and already had #2 started, but you have to decide how much time you want to spend on this and if it might be cheaper to take the quicker route out with #1. With Linux all you want to do and more is available for free, you just have to put it together (and in many cases a lot of the puzzle is already put together by people like the Debian package maintainers, should you choose Debian).

 

[buleyb]

We use QoS for IPtables in Linux for our use here. Look into that

 

[Carp1812]

Thanks for the suggestions thus far. I will look into them. Does anybody have any ideas that I could do without scrapping together another machine? Unfortuantely I don't have the parts right now for a linux box. It's something I've been wanting to get into for a long time, but it's not very feasible just yet. Thanks guys.
CARP ><>

 

[Nothinman]

The only real options are to limit the bandwidth at either the 1) router or 2) the machine causing the problems and #2 would probably be easily worked around as they're probably local administrators so that leaves #1.