Measuring Wireless Traffic

[androo87]

First of all - my first post on anandtech 🙂

In my student flat at the moment I have installed a Linksys wireless router to share our 2mb ADSL internet between the 4 of us.

Thing is, now surfing speed seems to periodically come to a complete standstill. Everyone denies excessive use, but i have seen people bittorrenting at 210/30 kB/s. I know when I have put limits on peoples bittorrent limit on their computer they set it straight back themselves!

I have in the past used 'NetMeterr' to monitor my own internet bandwith and I was wondering if anyone knows of a similar tool where I could check how much each client is downloading/uploading?

And a step further - is there a simple way to limit it so everyone gets a fair allocation?

I would rather not block any ports completely.

 

[ScottMac]

Nope, not really, not in a consumer flavor of AP ... it's shared bandwidth.

You could probably drop in an old PC running a Linux firewall with some pacing functionality (between the jack and the AP), but the AP by itself will serve however much bandwidth that the user can consume, up to the bandwidth limitation of the system.

Good Luck, Welcome to the board!

Scott

 

[JackMDS]

If it is a "Flashable" Linksys WRT54G, look at the variety of 3rd party firmware.

http://www.linksysinfo.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=31

Some of them, at least in part, might be able to provide central control.

:sun:

 

[Atheus]

There are a few easy to use firmwares which have QoS allowing throttling specific ports, but you can configure bittorrent to use any port, so that's not foolproof. You would need to throttle the protocol, which only OpenWRT can do because it has IPtables with all the trimmings. Other linux firewalls (IPcop etc) and Cisco IOS can do it too but they obviously can't be flashed to your WRT54G.

 

[androo87]

thanks
it is a Linksys WAG354G and I couldnt find any 3rd party firmware for that.

I was thinking about using a wireless sniffer, but its maybe more trouble than its worth and I don't really want to get into that territory.. ?

 

[androo87]

limiting it so everyone gets a fair allocation - is this bandwith throttling?

and is there an easy and easily changeable way to do this? or would i need special hardware firewalls etc?

 

[nweaver]

iirc you can use (as was mentioned earlier) an old box running iptables. Once you move to that solution, the options are very wide open. I would probably just use QOS to prioritize http traffic, or game traffic (if that's the problem) and then spank anyone who changes BT port to those.

 

[Kelemvor]

Might be easier to just shell out for a WRT54G off eBay (<$50) and flash it with something (or find a different router) that will give you good QoS support. Then just don't tell the roommates the password to the router. It won't affect them up/downloading huge amoutns when no one else is on, but when multipl epeople are trying to use it, it can be set to throttle the speed so that no one person can hog all of it.