limit bandwith?

[BeHeMOTH]

Ok I just got cable and I have 3 PC's on the network. I'm the only heavy hitter in the family so I want to bottle neck the other 2 connections if possible so that I retain a good chunk after all I pay for it I have the SMC router and I've installed 10MB Nics in the other PC with a 10/100 in mine.

I wasn't sure if I could choke it at the router or not, if I can't no big deal but if I can

Is there any 3rd party software to use?

 

[BuckMaster]

It sure can be done. When ever you want the full bandwidth just unplug the rest of the computers from the router and tell the rest of the family the cable modem is down!

 

[MJT2k]

It sure can be done. When ever you want the full bandwidth just unplug the rest of the computers from the router and tell the rest of the family the cable modem is down!

LOL! Good one.

Have you thought of using a Linux box/route. That should be able to do what you want.

 

[spidey07]

just how accurate is this linux solution and exactly how does it limit bandwidth? Any white papers on this stuff?

<edit> curious...I spend a crap load of money on gear to do this very thing

 

[randal]

Yea, i'm in the same boat with spidey; we do some colocation here at my job and can't stop the people on the floor from sucking our pipe dry ... we'd *love* to get some kind of speed-management software; linux or win2k.

btw, anyone know if 3Com SuperStack switches are port-manageable?

thanks,
randal

 

[MJT2k]

I will be honest, I have never done this in Linux, BUT I have seen it done. It is possible I am not sure how to go about it.

 

[Salvador]

A little off subject, but is the bandwidth only limited when 2 or more people are using the internet at the same time off a network? What I mean is even though I have multiple computers sharing cable internet via a router, will the bandwidth be limited at all if only one person is using their computer to surf? I'm not sure if the fact of networking your computers slows your systems down at all.

Thanks,

Sal

 

[spidey07]

salvador,

networking is like a big road system. cars being information moved between computers. bandwidth being the speed limit and number of lanes.

Bandwidth is &quot;shared&quot; among your computers accessing the internet. Now if you have 20 computers and only one is doing anything internet related then that one computer gets full capacity. If you have five computers all downloading MP3s then capacity is roughly split between the five because there are five times as many cars on the road.

hope this helps, but I'm curious about this linux solution and want to try it out in the lab with a sniffer to see if it actually does active TCP tuning and shaping.

<edit> - behemoth, what you are asking for is very complex. many solutions cost from 5000 to 30000 dollars. BUT, if some kind of EASY linux solution works well then please somebody lay it on us!

 

[BuckMaster]

Salvador,

You can have up to 4 computers on the Netgear RT314 Router for exmaple. If you just doing files sharing and copying files nothing will be effected as for as the router is concerned. That same Netgear also runs at 100 Base. Its very fast for copy files from one PC to the other. Now if you have more then 1 computer on the internet it will run at the full connection to the internet that your ISP allows. Cable Modems vary because of sharing nodes. If your running more then one computer for the internet it just shares the bandwidth with the other computers you have hooked up. Its no big deal so dont worry yourself The only way you will see a big differance is if you have like 3 or 4 people surfing the internet at the same time and copying big files to there H/D. Regardless you will be much happier if your moving up from a 56K modem!

My damn slow typing spidey07 bet me to it! hehehe

 

[Salvador]

Thanks!

Sal

 

[Garion]

FYI, bandwidth limiting is usually called &quot;traffic shaping.&quot; Unfortunately, most of the apps for this kind of thing are really for the enterprise, not the home user. A company called Packeteer is fairly dominant in the traffic shaping market. Good stuff but pricey.

- G

 

[Garion]

One more idea.. If you did want to try and do this via linux, ONLY put the other two PC's behind the Linux router. So you'd have your machine and the Linux router connected to your SMC router.

You know.. An effective way to do this might be to throw Linux on and old 486 to act as a router. Probably wouldn't be very fast and hey - If it gets out of hand you can just punch the 'ole turbo button and shut 'em down to 28.8 speeds.

Although, in all fairness you probably won't have a problem sharing bandwidth. I've got two PC's in my office using my @home cable via a broadband router (Watchguard SOHO). I've had times when I'm downloading something at 200KB/s from download.com on one and I don't even notice the difference in performance on the other. Chances are you won't even know that the other machines are there. Do a bit of testing, but I think you'll be surprised how fast cable is. And if you're seeing a performance hit, chances are that it's NOT the other two computers but a bunch of other people on your cable segment downloading the playmate of the month collection at 1600x1280x32.

- G

 

[goldboyd]

Not sure how to do it on linux, but here's a nice article on how to do it with FreeBSD. http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/

 

[doug]

Try these links:

http://ldp.hebweb.ch/HOWTO/Adv-Routing-HOWTO-8.html

http://plutarco.disca.upv.es/~jcperez/AdminUnix/www.linuxports.com/howto/networking/x1395.htm

 

[Damaged]

vlans on a Juniper M20. You can limit bandwidth nicely. If you get routed and gated you'll &quot;get&quot; the Juniper...pretty much.

 

[Symfornix]

randal,

3300s are port manageable

 

[sadb0i]

i just have an idea...

there are tweaks so u go into regedit and maximize recieving ports...what f we change the numebrs from being big to small...

cant you do the opposite of this?

 

[CplHicks]

This will work, but I'm not sure if it's feasible in your situation(esp. if your network is spread out):

Connect your secondary PCs to your main PC via Serial port with Direct Connection cables. Then you can set the serial ports to whatever speed you want (4800-115200bps). Make your secondary PCs access the internet via the serial port. You can still let them use the regular network for LAN access, etc. I use serial port connections at work to simulate wireless network speeds and it works quite well. Hope this helps.

 

[gaidin123]

I have set up a RedHat Linux 7 system as a traffic shaping/port forwarding/ip masquerading machine. Search on google for 'linux advanced routing howto' and you will find the main docs regarding traffic shaping under Linux using the iproute2 tools.

With a script (or a lot of hand typed commands ) you can play with the bandwidth however you want. You can dynamically change the amount of incoming and outgoing bandwidth any machine gets, any subnet, any specific port on any specific machine, etc. etc. The tools are completely free of course, though it took me a while to get things working pretty much the way I wanted them to. I wish it was a little more userfriendly...There seems to be an awfully high demand for friendly, easy to use bandwidth managing tools for non-corporate users out there.

The traffic shaping is pretty accurate though to get exact numbers I've had to use some bandwidth monitoring apps and change my script/re-run it and watch the numbers change. That may just be how I've set it up though, most people seem to find that the iproute2 stuff is very accurate.

Gaidin

 

[Damaged]

I've been meaning to play around with that stuff in Linux for ages. Maybe it's time I got serious about it and actually do it and learn it. I can certainly see the uses for it.