Brother is stealing all bandwith

[madeinme]

I have a Netgear R6050 router. I have common sense/knowledge of internet and router configuration. I've read a lot of fourms and have gotten a lot of advice for this situation. I get 80 MB down and my brother is just taking it all by torrenting.. and he's literally ALWAYS torrenting. I'm still trying to figure out what there is left in the internet for him to torrent. I know one thing that I can't do that I've seen a lot I can't just "talk to him" about it because he's ignorant and selfish and just denies doing it even though my chrome will take 20 seconds to load whatever simple browsing page I put in... I've seen a lot about QoS, well with my router I can't do any specific limiting on it and all I can do it set priorities and all that did was bog me down to 25 mb/s down, no thanks. I have found a temporary fix which was block sites by keywords but he noticed that very quickly and he's crying about it... so what is a way he can download but I can limit him HARD? Like I don't want it interrupting anything.
Thanks for any advice anyone offers

 

[Berliner]

Write him an official looking letter.

The second best option might be to rate limit his port, if your router allows that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Simple question, who pays for the Internet? You or him? If it's you, cut him off every time you catch him torrenting. But increase the cutoff time for every incident.

 

[John Connor]

If you pay for the Internet, then add OpenDNS DNS servers to your router in the DNS settings and create an account at www.OpenDNS.com. Now go into the block settings and block P2P sites. Add porn to really piss him off too. LOL

If you add a custom DNS he could manully change his DNS on the computer. To prevent this a third party firmware like DD-WRT can block DNS and that will allow only the router's DNS handout and anything from a computer is blocked.

To block DNS it's in the access restrictions in DD-WRT.

Unfortunately, QOS is really the only solution and that can be problematic.

Get a better router. This one is higly recommended, but if you or anyone buys it make sure up update the default firmware. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833320091

 

[Gryz]

Your brother ? In your house ? Playing dirty ?

Wait till he's away for an hour.
Start his PC.
Start his torrent application.
Go to Options->Preferences->Bandwidth
(This is uTorrent, but I'm sure other torrent clients have similar options).
Limit his upload and download maximum speeds to 70 or 80% of the available bandwidth.
Turn off the PC.

I bet he won't even notice it.
If he truly doesn't care about what he does, and truly doesn't know how to change things, he will never ever even look at his torrent settings.
Problem solved.


==
QoS on a router is not gonna solve your downstream problems. People can't even explain to me how that's supposed to work. So no way it actually does something significant.

 

[It's Not Lupus]

check if there is a bandwidth limiter option instead of QoS.

 

[master_shake_]

Another vote for QoS

 

[CA19100]

And if this is your parents' house and it's their internet, then rat him out for illegal downloading. Sometimes the technical solution isn't the best one.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Look into QoS. Also put him on a separate vlan, then put QoS on the actual vlan. Also allows you to setup rules to isolate him from your vlan so if he does something that gets his machine compromised or virused it wont affect yours too. You can still allow certain things through as needed.

 

[matricks]

If you pay for the Internet, then add OpenDNS DNS servers to your router in the DNS settings and create an account at www.OpenDNS.com. Now go into the block settings and block P2P sites. Add porn to really piss him off too. LOL

If you add a custom DNS he could manully change his DNS on the computer. To prevent this a third party firmware like DD-WRT can block DNS and that will allow only the router's DNS handout and anything from a computer is blocked.

If you still want to solve this technically, I think this is a good solution, although I don't know how complete OpenDNS P2P blocklists are. You don't need DD-WRT to block external DNS servers, the most basic of firewalls can do it. All connections from local network to WAN on UDP port 53 should be blocked, simple. Depending on how the router behaves you may have to exclude its local network address (e.g. 192.168.1.1) in this rule.

Depending on your own needs you could also block outbound connections to all ports except TCP ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS). He can still torrent through that with a VPN connection, but running TCP-in-TCP like that is painful.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Most likely the problem is not the bandwidth, but the torrent client making way, way too many connections for the router to handle.

Only solution is to limit the number of simultaneous connections in the torrent client.

 

[Fardringle]

To follow up with what others said, if you pay for the connection, tell your brother that if he doesn't stop hogging the bandwidth with torrents you'll just disconnect him completely.